Live, Love, Lie
by Lilyana Turner
Summary: During Parker McNealson's sophomore year, everything changes, especially when she befriends the dashingly handsome Odd Della Robbia and his equally handsome friend, Ulrich. What follows is a hilarious account of high school and life.
1. In Which I Go Back To School

A/N: Here we go. I've been happily ignoring this for two years, and the other day I picked it up and COULD NOT put it back down. It's a little bit fitting that I started working on it just as I was going into high school, and now that I'm about to graduate from college I'm still not done. Anyways. I hope that you guys like it!

ZXCVBNM

I hate boys.

Really. And if you think about it, I am totally justified in this manner of feeling. They don't bathe regularly. They curse and swear. They walk into a room, grab a shirt off the floor, smell it, and declare it good for another week. They wear so little cologne that you want them to wear more, and when they do it makes your eyes water and your nose burn. They wear their poor hats to death, and then some. And they'd rather end up lost than ask for directions.

And before you scoff and wave me off, just listen. I _know_. I live with seven of them.

I am the only estrogen-bearing, period-having, living, breathing, thing with boobs in my entire household. It has its moments. Most of the time it sucks.

I have five brothers. Dan, Eric, Connor, Mason, and Jacob, in that order, and they're _all_ older than me. Then there's my father, who teaches English at this boarding school in France, called Kadic. That's actually where I live—France. I was born in America to American parents, and English was my first language, but my parents moved to France when I was four because my mother was desperately in need of treatment for her cancer. My dad couldn't support all of us, so he got a job at Kadic. After Mom died we stayed, and we've been here ever since.

We also live with my grandfather—mom's dad. Nana died when Dan was two, and he's 23 now, so she was gone way before I was born. Papa stayed with us, at first because Nana had died and he didn't want to be alone, and then for Mom, who was battling her first round of cancer. When we moved, he followed us.

And then there's me. August Christine Parker McNealson, at your service.

So I'm fifteen years old this year. Jake is seventeen, and Mason is eighteen. Connor and Eric, the twins, are twenty (Eric is older by exactly twelve minutes and seventeen seconds), and Dan is twenty-three. All this said to show that, while I'm at Kadic, Mason and Jake are there too. Which makes it pretty impossible for any guy to even look at me. Not that they'd want to. I mean, I'm not ugly, but I'm not exceptionally pretty either. I have all the right features in all the right places, a couple freckles, and that's about it. And I'm completely FLAT. To the point that, even though I'm fifteen and most girls my age have started wearing women's bras by now, I've just gotten to the point where I have to wear one every single day. Yeah, shutting up about boobs now.

Right. So. Now that I've introduced my immediate family, let's move on. Eric and Connor are both engaged. Connor is engaged to Maggie, who is definitely very French. I try not to comment too much about her. Eric, my fun-loving older brother who is very in-tune with his inner child, is engaged to a fun-loving, teenager-at-heart named Lydia. She was actually here studying ballet, and Eric was with his friend visiting another dancer who was friends with Lydia. They made eye contact and haven't stopped looking since. Lydia has a daughter, Zoe, who was adopted from Korea. They also have a dog named Kujo (yes, after the dog in that movie) who spends more time at our house than at his. This could be because Lydia's apartment has a strict no-pets policy. And probably because he's a big smelly St. Bernard.

That's everyone. To recap, I have five brothers, one father, one grandfather, no mother, a niece, and one quasi-dog.

Okay. So, moving on.

The new year at Kadic will be… different. And not different good.

My best friend, Emily, and I, sort of had a… falling out, if you will, over the summer. I really don't want to get into all the nasty little details, but I will say this. If I'd seen it coming I probably could have dealt with it a little better. Emily had been my best friend since the first grade, and losing her, no joke, was really hard. It's like one day I was her best friend and the next day she didn't know I existed anymore. That really, _really_ sucked. It just… well, it threw me, but it hurt, you know?

Anyways, I've said all this so that I can launch into the epic story of Who Changed My Life And How They Did It.

ZXCVBNM

Mom died when I was in the seventh grade, but when she was alive we'd make breakfast for the boys on the first day of school, and take pictures, and send them all on their way. When I started, I loved it. School, I mean. I would stay up the entire night in anticipation, and then be unable to drag myself out of bed in the morning in time to eat breakfast. I'd always go grouchy and hungry and tired, and I loved every minute of it.

Now that there's only three of us in school instead of six, Papa makes breakfast. Dan and Eric and Connor get the rest of us out of bed, and by this time Dad's already at school doing teacher stuff. We eat, and then we go visit Mom's grave. It's something we started doing the year she died—we go every weekend. When we come back we go to school, and then we come home and go to Luigi's, home of the best pizza on the planet. It's great.

I woke up that morning at 5:30, determined to make a good impression on anyone who wished to be impressed. Then I went upstairs and ate breakfast with the rest of the family.

Dad never left on time for the first day of school, hence his being in the kitchen hastily eating a toaster strudel. He held a bouquet of red roses in one hand, a coffee cup in the other, and his briefcase was lying open on the floor. Papers were scattered about. Dad, needless to say, looked annoyed.

"Damn latch broke again." He muttered, then took a sip of his coffee.

"Good morning to you too, Dad!" I said cheerfully, squatting down to help Connor pick up the papers. Connor was pretty much the only one who did anything around the house at all. He cleaned. He cooked. He vacuumed. He did the laundry. He walked the dog. If there was something to be done, it was Connor's job. Not that the rest of us were all lazy slobs, because we weren't. Actually, it was more like Connor was very… touchy. He wanted things done perfectly, and if you couldn't do that, there was no point in even trying. He got very upset, no joke, about the towels being folded the wrong way or the floor not being vacuumed right. Like, to the point that he would revacuum the room so that all the lines on the carpet matched up. So, mostly, we just let him do his own chores, and less work for us!

"Sorry." Dad apologized, reorganizing the stacks of paper we handed him. "Briefcase is old. It's been around since before I married your mother."

"You'd think you could get a new one!" Dan waltzed by, carrying a plate of eggs and bacon. A biscuit was perched rather precariously on the side of the plate, a big slap of butter stuck on the top.

"I should, but I can't. I'd rather just hang on to this one, if it's all the same to you." Dad grinned. "Are we going to go visit Mom today?"

Papa walked into the room. My grandfather is no spring chicken. He was twenty-two when my mother was born, and she was twenty-five when Dan was born, and Dan is twenty-three now, so that makes Papa about… Seventy. Right on the nose. But even though he's seventy, he's still pretty spry for an old man. He can outrun Dan, the hockey player, on a bad day, and Mason, the skinny track nerd, on a good one. God only knows how badly he'd beat _me_. "It's tradition, Jacob." Papa winked at my father, then sat down at the table, helping himself to a biscuit. He looked around the table for a minute, then directly at Mason. "Boy, where's the lard?"

We had this conversation every single morning. "The what, Papa?" Mason asked, even though he knew the answer.

"The lard, boy! The grease from the pig! Only proper way to eat a biscuit is to smother it in lard!" Papa was born and raised in Alabama. Lard is, apparently, very big in Alabama. Then, with a wink at the rest of us, Papa added, "Why, when I was your age…"

I grabbed a biscuit from the table and my school bag from the door. "I'm ready." I announced, blowing a stray piece of hair from my face. "Anyone else?"

"Yeah, I'm done." Mason stood up, brushing the crumbs from his shirt.

"Me too." Dan took his coffee mug from the table. "Okay. Let's go."

ZXCVBNM

Visiting my mother was not a hard thing to do. I'd been incredibly close to her. I was hurt by her death, but I knew it was coming, so perhaps I was not hurt quite as much as I would have been if my family hadn't been completely honest with me about Mom's cancer. We visited Mom every weekend, and Dad always had roses. My mother was a true romantic. Every time my dad brought home roses Mom would just about melt, and then they'd go lock themselves in a bedroom for hours at a time while Dan and Papa tried to distract the rest of us who were too young to know where babies _really_ came from.

We weren't quiet when we visited her, either. We made noise. We jumped around. We wore colors. Mom would have wanted it, so that's what we did. We'd visit her grave and lay the roses down, pick up the dried ones from last week, stay for a while, and go home. Today we took a picture, with all of us gathered around the grave stone. After we were done the group broke up, with Dan and the twins headed off to the house and the rest of us toward the train station. Papa drove us, dropped us off, and went home.

The train was late. Joy.

"Hey." Jake poked me between the shoulder blades. "I'm bored."

"Me too." I leaned up against the wall. "Rock Paper Scissors?"

"Yeah, why not?" Jake leaned against the wall beside me. "Okay. One, two, three, scissors."

"Damn. I had paper."

Jake let out a satisfied "ha!" and presented me with his fist so we could go another round.

Jake is blind. I don't know what his vision is, in terms of numbers, but it's safe enough to say that he's blind as a bat. He's considered legally blind by the French government, hence not being able to drive a car, hence the whole reason we take the train into the city every morning. That, and it's easier than loading all of us into a car and going to school, then trying to coordinate schedules so we all go home at the same time. He goes to normal classes and has normal teachers, he just reads all his textbooks in Braille instead of letters.

He's brilliant. Anything he does, he does well. Take math, for instance. A normal seventeen-year-old would be taking pre-calculus. Jake took it as an eighth grader. He has an A in German and Latin, an A in chemistry, an A in his computer class, and he competes regularly with Jeremie Belpois, who is in my grade, for the number one grade slot in Kadic. It sucks, and we're all green with envy.

He also has the coolest dog in the whole world. Echo is a mutt, but he's an adorable mutt. He looks like a cross between a poodle and a lab, but that could just be me. He's incredibly well trained-he sits there patiently until Jake needs him, and then he springs into action like superdog.

"You suck at this game." Jake grinned at me. "Okay. One, two, three, rock."

"Paper."

He stuck his tongue out at me.

Mason walked up behind Jake but didn't say anything. With a wink, he just stood there.

If you didn't know Jake you wouldn't be able to tell that he wasn't blind. The sunglasses he wears are the only abnormal thing about him. We can walk up to him and not say anything, and within ten seconds he has us identified and involved in a conversation. He does this by scents and sounds. The soles of Mason's shoes squeak, so anytime anyone with squeaky soles walks past him, it has to be Mason. I am the only one in the house who smells even remotely like a girl, thus making me very easy to identify.

"I know you're there." Jake said lightly. "Wanna play?"

"Yeah." Mason leaned against the wall beside us. "One, two, three, rock."

Echo whined and put his head on his paws. Then we heard the far-off rumbling that signaled the coming of a train. Echo, well trained as he is, is freaked out by dead people and trains. When we take him to visit mom he freaks out and we have to leave him in the car. On the train, there really isn't another option except to keep a firm grip on his collar and dare him to move. Anyways, the train ride was long and boring, and most of us used it to sleep. So when we finally pulled up to the stop twenty minutes later, we emerged all stumbly and bleary-eyed.

From there we walked about ten minutes to the school. As I stood outside looking at the gates, with Mason on my left and Jake on my right, it became very clear indeed.

It was time to go back to school.

ZXCVBNM

The first thing I noticed when I got to Kadic was the sheer number of new faces. I knew a lot of seniors had graduated, but I didn't think it was enough to warrant the sixty or seventy new people I saw just standing in the courtyard. The second thing I noticed was a little dog, running through the crowd, apparently starved for the sight of grass. The third thing I noticed was Odd Della Robbia, a guy from my math class the year before, chasing the little dog.

"Kiwi!" Odd yelled after the dog, skidding to a stop at a corner. "You stupid mutt!" Kiwi looked up at Odd, amusement in his eyes (if a dog could convey amusement through his eyes?...) and barked. "Oh, shut up." Odd scooped the mutt up in his arms and turned on his heel, very quickly. And landed nose-to-chest with Ulrich Stern, class heartthrob, and totally unattainable. Rumor had it that he was either dating or completely smitten with Yumi Ishiyama. Already the world seems a little darker…

"Jim's going to find him eventually, you know." Ulrich remarked drily, slinging an arm over Odd's shoulders.

"And I say, let him come!" Odd thrust a finger into the air as the pair started walking away. "Kiwi's a smart dog. He won't let some buffoon like Jim find him, will you, Kiwi?" Kiwi barked a reply to this, at which point Ulrich said something else. The guys were then out of earshot and I couldn't hear them anymore. But did that stop me from watching them? Noooooo…

I think it is absolutely hilarious that the entire student body knows that Odd keeps a dog in his wardobe drawer, yet the adults, my father included, have no idea. Kiwi is forever escaping and Odd always goes after him, and neither one of them get caught.

A hand landed on my shoulder. It belonged to Mason. "You like him, yeah?"

"Ew, gross." I shrugged his hand off. "He's cute but unattainable. Taken."

"Sucks, doesn't it?"

I laughed. "You have no idea."

Mason just laughed. "Well, you can't win 'em all," he said, flashing me a grin and walking away.

ZXCVBNM

My first class was Math. Math is the bane of my existence. It is a full hour and ten minutes of sitting there listening to Ms. Meyer drone on and on about cosines and tangents and many, many other supernaturally boring math terms that will do absolutely nothing for me once I've graduated. Joy.

After Math came German, the third language that I am at least semi-fluent in. As a rule, people in Europe study English starting from the second grade. I've always had good grades in it because English was my first language and we speak it at home (usually). Anyways. I started studying German because I was not interested in Latin or Spanish or Russian.

After German was History, the coolest class on the planet. Maybe that was only because we had the coolest teacher on the planet, but whatever… Mr. Langdon started the class off with a debate on whether beheading Loius and Marie was such a good idea. I said no. Not that it was a good idea, but that we shouldn't have done it, because if you really look back in history, the King and Queen had no idea that their people were suffering. They were living on in wonderful excellence with their children, and all the while their subjects were living a life of desolation. I blame this on their advisors. Their purpose is to advise. They didn't do that.

Odd was also in my psychology class. Oh, joy. Now, don't get me wrong, Odd Della Robbia is a perfectly acceptable human being. He hasn't done jail time. He doesn't have three pregnant ex-girlfriends. He doesn't have a drug record. What he does have, however, is a reputation of being the kind of person who sits down for a project, proclaims themselves no good at this stuff, and goes off to do something else, leaving the other partner to do everything while Odd reaps the benefits of "hard work". He was small, not necessarily short, and usually wore his hair down these days after complaints that it got in the way of other students. He was kind of cute, I had to admit, although Ulrich was infinitely cuter.

Mr. Langdon taught the class for about twenty minutes before he went off to do something else. Probably a teacher. "Well, guys," he said, sitting on his desk, "I've got other stuff to do. Do something productive." With that, he hopped off the desk and walked out of the classroom.

I saw Odd get up from the other side of the classroom and walk over to where Jeremie Belpois was sitting, his head buried in some book. Jeremie always had a book. Always. It was a constant. Like, there are always stars in the sky, or the moon is always out, the sun is always shining, the grass is always greener on the other side. Jeremie always had a book. Which is why it took Odd a considerable amount of time to drag him away from it and into a conversation.

I sat there, drumming my fingers on the desk. I was _bored_. My book was back at the house, because I'd forgotten it in the haste to get out of the house and go see Mom. Mr. Langdon hadn't assigned us any homework, so I sat there, bored stiff, until the bell rang forty minutes later.

From there, it was off to lunch. Thank God, both Mason and Jake had my lunch period, so we sat together. Mason saw that I looked miserable, and I think Jake figured it out.

"What's up?" Mason asked, taking a bite out of his sandwich. "You look terrible."

"Thanks. I love you too." I grabbed a sandwich and chowed down. "No, I'm just…" I sighed. "Alone, I guess."

"Aren't we all." Jake muttered. "You know, being a boy sucks sometimes."

"Hey. That is_ not _fair. Do you _know_ how hard it is to be the only thing with estrogen?"

"Yeah, yeah…" Mason waved me off. All the boys had heard this lecture a thousand times. "We know. You have so kindly informed us about a hundred million thousand times."

I crossed my eyes at him. "Stuff it."

Mason grinned. "I'm so glad this is my last year here!"

"I try not to think about you graduating this year. It makes me sad."

"Well, I'll still be here next year. I'm not going anywhere special." Mason wanted to be a _track star_… Which meant no college for him! That was a good idea. He'd go run a while, make some big bucks, then come home, settle down, and use his earnings to find a good nursing home for dad while the rest of us chased kids around the house. The only flaw in this plan was this: Kadic's track team _sucked_. Not just a little. It was _bad_. They came in last in just about every race they ran, and the ones they placed higher was because of Mason's score alone. Hey. I can't help but brag. The kid can fly when he wants to.

"Dad wants you to go to college, you know."

"Oh, yes, I know. And so does Papa. And Dan. And Eric and Connor and Jake, for that matter. I think you're the only one who doesn't want me to go."

"I never said that." I winked at him. "I just said that if you go, I get your room."

"That's why I'm not going."

"Oh, come on. There's barely enough room for all of us now. Wait until Maggie and Lydia move in… And Lydia has a kid, too!"

"Yeah, yeah. And if Zoe draws on the walls, you can't cover it up with paint…"

Let me explain about our house. We actually live about thirty minutes away from Kadic, 20 if you take the train into the city. It's on this great piece of land where there's grapes, and that's about it. It's not a vineyard, if that's what you were wondering. Anyways, it's an old, old house. Have you ever watched the movie Babe? In that movie, old Farmer Hogget and his wife live in an old house in northern England where everything is… old.

That's exactly what our house is like. The entire thing is made of stone. It's not exactly big, more like an average sized house, but it's big enough to fit all of us, and that's all we need. It's drafty in the winter and hot as hell in the summer, and we love it that way.

The house was mom's idea. When we moved here we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she'd be done with her chemo soon, and we could start life as a normal family again. So, we decided to stay. At that point Dan was thirteen, so he was the only one who really had any trouble leaving people behind to start over. The rest of us were totally gung-ho. So, we packed up, moved, and settled down here on an old ex-vineyard, and we've been here ever since, in a beautiful house overlooking absolutely nothing.

"Just you wait. Eric and Lydia's kids…" I shuddered involuntarily. "Now that'll be something to see."

Mason twitched. "Oh God. They'll be just like their parents."

"I know it." I paused and looked at him. He winked. And then, in unison, we said, "We need a bigger house."

Jake shook his head. "No way. Never. I am in love with our house."

"Well, you can buy it from dad and stay there. You're almost eighteen."

"Yeah, if I wasn't blind I could drive next year!" He punched his fist in the air, then crossed his arms.

That's something else about France that irks me. Okay, so the legal drinking age is sixteen, right? Well, you can't drive until you're eighteen. Which means that you have two years in which to cause all sorts of mayhem on the road while drunk. On the other hand, it gives you two years to learn how to hold your liquor so you don't cause mayhem and madness. Good and bad at the same time. In America, you don't drive until you're sixteen and you don't drink until you're 21.

"Lucky." I muttered. I still had three more years before I could even think about getting behind the wheel of a car, hence my taking the train to school every morning. Then I crossed my eyes at him even though he couldn't see me. "I'm so bored. Lunch lasts _forever_."

"Be glad that it does. It's less time we have to spend in school!"

"More, actually. If we got half an hour for lunch instead of an hour, things would go a lot smoother. We'd get out at 3:30 instead of 4." Mason shook his head. "Whatever. I'm going outside. Anyone want to come?"

"I'll stay here." Jake said, motioning to his latest book—something about the medieval political structures of England, in Braille. Two seconds later he was off learning about Archibald the Nervous who conquered the Danes and took all their women as his concubines. Mason rolled his eyes and walked out the door. I followed.

Mason, skinny as he was, was also good at soccer, which is why a few guys stole a ball from Gym and started a game out on the courtyard. Odd della Robbia and Ulrich Stern were among those guys. I sat on the steps, bemoaning my lack of athletic abilities and watching Mason and two other guys slaughter anyone who dared oppose them.

This became our tradition. Our schedule. Every day we'd finish lunch, go outside, and Mason would play some sport while I watched from the steps. It became a ritual. Everything was always the same.

Until, one day, it wasn't.

A/N: Please review and let me know what you think! Reviews keep me motivated to ignore my school work and post new chapters!


	2. In Which I Have A Really Jankity Dream

A/N: I really want to get an update schedule going, buuuuttt… (there's always a but, isn't there?) exams are about to start and so updates will probably be sporadic at best until January, when I get back into the new semester and I know what my life looks like. Until then, here is the next chapter! Thanks for reading!

ZXCVBNM

I met Emily when I was in the sixth grade, the year we both came to Kadic. I'd been in France since I was four years old, but I'd been in public school for the first five years of my educational career since Kadic only runs from sixth grade through twelfth grade and isn't open to elementary school aged kids. That didn't mean that I was unfamiliar with Kadic; I had five older brothers who were all already _in _Kadic and I spent the majority of my time either at Dan's hockey games or at Mason's track and field meets. Even at age thirteen he was indispensible to the track team.

Anyways. Emily wandered into our sixth grade homeroom classroom the first day of class, then promptly glued herself to my side and offered me a cookie (and it was oatmeal raisin, too. My favorite). We got two desks right next to each other and gawped at all the new kids as they wandered into our classroom.

I recognized Sissi Delmas from public school. We'd shared a class for the last three years in a row, and I was glad that even though we shared a homeroom class that was the _only_ class we shared. She'd never been mean to me, but she was sometimes not the most pleasant person to be around and I usually took any opportunity I could to avoid her.

Emily and I met Jeremie Belpois, who we thought was the smartest sixth grader we had ever encountered. We met Herv and Nicholas, who even in the sixth grade were pimply and gorillaish. And when I took Emily home with me for the first time and she met my brothers, she stood absolutely in awe of Mason and Eric, who she ogled unashamedly and who I assume she still continues to ogle unashamedly. I wouldn't know. We don't talk anymore.

ZXCVBNM

Back to the present. A couple days after school started, things got real interesting.

Everything started in second period. I had Italian, the most beautiful language on the planet. I only taken it the year before because I had no interest in German and I already spoke English, but just a few days into class I had decided that I wanted to speak nothing but Italian for the rest of my life.

I was tired because I woke up too early, so I put my head down on my desk, intending to go to sleep. But I couldn't sleep, so I listened to Signor Partain yell at the freshmen for being stupid. After we took a pop quiz (in the first week of class! Who DOES that?) he announced that we could spend the rest of the period outside.

It was warm, so I found a spot in the sun and sat down on the bleachers. There was a second period gym class (of which Mason was a member) so he and some guys from my class started a game of soccer (Mason's team was winning). Jim sat there looking forlorn, and I knew the seniors had outsmarted him again. They always found a loophole and managed to get out of whatever it was that he wanted them to do by tricking him into letting them play soccer. Anyways, I was sitting on the bleachers reading a book, when all of a sudden, something made me look up.

This cloud of smoke came floating down the soccer field. I remember staring at it, wondering, _Where the jank did that come from? _Because no one was smoking, so it couldn't have been cigarette smoke. Nothing was on fire (at least, not that I could tell) so it wasn't fire smoke. I was sitting on the bleachers trying to figure out where it _could_ have come from, when it collided with Mason.

Mason coughed once, then clutched his head and fell to his knees with a groan that I heard all the way across the field. I shoved myself off of the bleachers and ran across the soccer field, and I was reaching out to grab Mason by the hand when Odd grabbed me by the waist and pulled me back.

"What are you DOING?" I asked, violently trying to push myself away. For all that Odd may have weighed ninety-eight pounds soaking wet, he was all muscle and he was much stronger than me. I would have punched him but he had my arms pinned to my sides, and even though I was squirming and stomping on his toes for all I was worth, I knew I wasn't going to wrench myself away from him anytime soon.

I was close enough to Mason that I could see how he was doing, and it wasn't good. He was on his hands and knees in the grass of the soccer field. His ears were bleeding, so I doubted he could hear anything, and even if he could, he didn't respond when I repeatedly called his name. His eyes were clenched shut, one hand fisted in the hair on the side of his head. He obviously had a whopper of a headache.

He looked up at me, and that was when I knew he was really in trouble.

Mason's eyes are usually green, but when he looked at me the only colors I saw in his eyes were black and white. And his pupils, instead of being round, were replaced with this weird symbol. Two circles, one within the other, and a dot in the middle of the second circle. The first circle had three thick lines coming from one end and a thinner line coming from the other end. It kind of looked like an eye, actually.

Someone placed a hand on my back and pushed me roughly away from Odd, who let out a frustrated "Hey!" and reached out to grab me again.

"Let her go." It was Jim's voice. I took the opportunity to break away from Odd and run the remaining five or so feet to Mason's side, when Ulrich pushed himself in front of me.

"Don't touch him."

I scowled at him and reached out to touch Mason on the shoulder to let him know I was there, when Ulrich grabbed my hand pulled it away.

"Seriously. Don't touch him." I didn't listen, and when I reached out again, Ulrich stood in front of me. "If you touch him, you'll be just as sick. I'm not kidding. Don't do it."

Jim was standing beside us, on the phone with emergency services. He snapped the phone shut and looked at me.

"Go get your dad."

Well, if I couldn't touch Mason, I might as well do _something_ useful. I turned on my heel and sprinted down the soccer field into the main building where my dad was teaching English on the second floor.

He was going over verbs with his ninth-graders when I burst into the room, pacing the floor and switching from English to French rapidly. My dad really knew how to work a crowd. He looked up when I skidded into the room, then crossed his arms at me. My dad really hated it when we interrupted him while he was teaching; if the other kids didn't have access to their parents at school, we shouldn't either.

"Dad," I panted, hanging onto the doorframe for support. "Mason's sick."

"Can you take him home?" He asked me, leaving his ninth graders gawping after us and striding across the room, ready to write a check-out note for both of us.

"No, he's _really _sick. Jim called an ambulance. His ears are bleeding."

If anything would convince my dad that someone was in dire need of medical attention, it was blood. The color drained out of his face, although it was probably more at the fact that I had mentioned the word "ambulance" than at the fact I had said "bleeding", and he shouted "class dismissed!" over his shoulder as he followed me back to the soccer field.

When we got back to Mason, we were shocked to find Jim laying on the ground, the same strange symbol that was in Mason's eyes also in his (Jim's). Ulrich crossed his arms and stared at me, an "I-told-you-so" expression on his face. I wondered how he'd known I would be sick if I touched Mason, but at that point I was more worried about Mason than I was about Ulrich's psychic abilities.

The paramedics had already loaded Jake onto a stretcher and stowed him in the back of the ambulance. Dad climbed in the back and left me to go collect Jake from his studies. As I sprinted back across the soccer fields, I spotted Ulrich and Odd deep in a conversation with Yumi Ishiyama and Jeremie Belpois. They didn't notice me watching, and in any case I wasn't _really_ watching because I was more concerned with finding Jake and getting to the hospital than figuring out what was up with Ulrich and Odd or why they had told me not to touch my brother. By the time I had returned to the faculty parking lot, Jake in tow, they were gone.

I wasn't yet legal to drive in France, but Dad had given me his car keys and told me to get to the hospital about as quick as I could. I'd been driving for a little more than a year, since Eric had been letting me drive when we went to the store together. So I got behind the wheel of that car and drove, hell-for-leather, to the hospital.

I met Dad in the waiting room, where he was pacing back and forth in between the chairs. We were only there for a few minutes before one of the doctors came out and told us that they weren't sure what was wrong with Jake, but that he was dying and there wasn't much the hospital staff could do about it.

Then, things got even weirder. Mason came sprinting down the hall, bumping into the startled doctors and nurses who were trying to get out of his way. Every one he touched fell to the ground, coughed, and then stood back up with their ears bleeding. And all of them had that weird symbol in their eyes.

Then this bright white light came out of nowhere. I screamed and flew upright in my desk, heart pounding. When I looked around, I was shocked. I was still in Italian class. Had I really dreamed that we'd gone outside? Apparently. I was still at my desk, quiz still in front of me, pen still in my hand.

The weird thing was, even though I knew I'd been dreaming, everything still happened the same way. We still went outside after our quiz. Jim still sat on the bleachers looking dejected, and Mason and Odd and Ulrich still played a game of soccer. The only thing that was conspicuously absent was the smoke cloud, and I was okay with that.

_What the JANK_? I thought, as I wandered from Italian to Psychology. That had to be the weirdest, most vivid dream I'd ever had. I'd never dreamed that anyone had almost died, and I certainly had never dreamed of the scent of blood before. I was still trying to puzzle it all out during Psychology when someone slapped a ruler down on my desk. I jumped in surprise, heart racing, then looked up.

Mr. Nichols was standing above my desk, both halves of a broken ruler clenched in his hands. "Enjoying your daydream?"

"Well…" We were already doing a unit on decoding dreams. I figured if I was going to puzzle out exactly what I'd dreamed about I might as well get Mr. Nichols in on it, so I gave him all the details of my dream, then sat back while he thought about it.

"Ah. A nightmare. But since it was during the day that would make it a daymare, right?" He raised one eyebrow at me and perched on the side of his desk.

"I don't know. I'm just trying to figure out what it means."

Mr. Nichols shrugged. "Maybe you have it in for one of your brothers. But I'd really rather you not kill him; Kadic might not win another track meet ever if you did."

I laughed weakly; I was still too shaken up to even talk about killing one of my brothers. I think Mr. Nichols knew, because he leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on his desk, then said, "This one time, I had a dream that Marilyn Monroe was a poltergeist. She was haunting my bedroom, and when I called the ghost exterminators, her brother showed up and tried to kill her with a laser pointer. But then, she possessed me, and I woke up screaming 'Haha! Now you'll be twenty-six forever!'"

"I had a dream that I married Jackie Chan!" Someone yelled out from the back of the room.

"Yeah, well get this. I had a dream that I had to marry Ulrich." A collective groan went through the class as Odd settled himself back into his desk. He held up a finger. "No, just listen. I had a dream that the Mormon church made me marry Ulrich. They gave me a get-thee-to-a-nunnery dress and took us to the sacred broom closet. We had to eat Chinese food with the elders of the church, and he had to wear a _fez_." He giggled, then continued, "And when I said I wouldn't marry him, he looked at me and said, 'Don't you love me?'"

"Hm. Well, I don't really know what to make of that." Mr. Nichols crossed his arms again, studying Odd. Apparently at a loss, he turned back to the whiteboard and started teaching again.

While Mr. Nichols continued with the lesson, Odd, who had claimed the desk next to me, leaned o

over and whispered, "What did Mason's eyes look like? Will you draw it for me?"

I shrugged but drew what I remembered. When I handed the piece of paper to Odd, the color drained out of his face. Wordlessly, he turned and handed the paper to Jeremie Belpois, who sat on Odd's other side. Jeremie had the same reaction; he turned ashen and sat back in his desk, staring dumbfounded at what I'd drawn.

"What's wrong?" I hissed at him. He shook his head, still staring at the symbol on the piece of paper. I looked at Odd, who stoically ignored me. I thought about wadding up a piece of paper and chucking it at his head, but I was already in enough trouble with Mr. Nichols without getting myself in a deeper hole just because I was curious about what the jank was going on.

Frustrated, I turned back to the lesson. _Screw Odd_, I thought. _His name describes him perfectly_.

ZXCVBNM

At lunch that day I sat down blearily between Mason and Jake, laying my head on my arms.

"What's wrong with you?" Mason asked me, poking me in the side.

I swatted his hand away and sat up. "Nothing. I'm just tired. I had a really terrible dream in Italian class."

Mason grunted in acknowledgement, then made a face. "Gross. My sandwich is dry."

"Good, because mine has mayonnaise." I gave him my sandwich and pressed a napkin into the bread to soak up a tomato juice ring. I've always been a picky eater, although I hadn't realized it until just recently. I'd give anything a chance once, but if I'd had a bad experience with a food I'm not likely to eat it again. Take beef-a-roni, for instance. I got food poisoning from it once, when I was in the third grade, and to this day I refuse to touch it. I won't eat condiments, I don't like most vegetables, and I absolutely cannot abide seafood. Well, I like scallops and oysters, but fish just creeps me out. Mason, on the other hand, will eat anything you put in front of him and never has a problem with not liking something because he eats so fast that most of the time I find it highly improbable that he even tastes what he's eating.

"What do you think they talk about?" He asked me, looking pointedly across the room to where Odd, Jeremie, Ulrich, and Yumi sat gathered around a table, deep in discussion about something. Odd looked up once to see us both watching him. Mason immediately looked away and busied himself with his lunch, but I stared back at Odd, narrowing my eyes. Eventually he looked away, back to Jeremie.

I shrugged. "I dunno. Did I tell you about what happened in Psychology?"

He shook his head. After I related what had happened, which involved telling Mason I'd had a dream where he almost died, he frowned.

"I don't know." He said again. "They seem like a pretty secretive bunch. Maybe you touched on some huge secret they don't want anyone to know."

"Maybe." I still wasn't satisfied. "It was just so _weird_. They both looked like they were going to faint, but they wouldn't tell me what was wrong."

"They probably didn't want to." Jake had been eerily silent but now spoke up.

"Well. Whatever." I shrugged and decided I wasn't hungry anymore. I put the remaining half of my sandwich back in its plastic bag and stood to throw it away.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder and I whirled around, but it was only Ulrich. "Can we talk to you for a minute?" He asked.

Mason was half-standing at the lunch table, I guess ready to come defend my honor. I shook my head at him, following Ulrich out the door and in the direction of the dorms.

The dorms were off limits during the day, especially to day students, but Ulrich didn't look like he was going to let the rules stop him so I followed him through the door and up to the third floor, into a room where Jeremie was sitting at the computer talking to a girl with pink hair. Odd was flopped down on Jeremie's bed and Yumi was sitting on the floor with her knees up.

"What's up?" I asked, because I already felt awkward enough and I figured someone had better speak or the silence was going to kill us.

No one seemed inclined to answer, so I crossed the room and sat down with my back against the wooden frame of Jeremie's bed. Jeremie swiveled in his chair and turned to face me.

"Did you have a dream about smoke almost killing your brother this morning?" He asked me pointedly.

"You were in Psychology; you heard me talk about it. Why?"

Jeremie cast a glance to Odd out of the corner of his eyes, while Ulrich and Yumi shifted uncomfortably. It seemed like they were carrying on a conversation without actually saying anything, but I figured when you had known each other as long as those four had, you could manage some degree of friend telepathy. Emily and I had been able to tell what each other were thinking with just a glance or even a change of posture, so I didn't doubt that all four of them were speaking to each other without actually using any words. Finally, Odd broke the silence.

"Well, here's the deal." He paused and drew in his breath, then sighed explosively. "I'm just going to launch into it, okay?" When I nodded, he continued. "Einstein over there," indicating Jeremie with a jerk of his head, "discovered a virtual world called Lyoko and its inhabitant, Aelita." The pink-haired girl on Jeremie's screen waved at me. I briefly wondered whether Aelita was a computer program or a real person, but Odd continued. "Lyoko is ruled by an evil overlord of a computer virus called X.A.N.A., who wants to take over the world. Our job is to stop him."

"Okay?" I wasn't really sure what all of this had to do with my dream until Jeremie picked up where Odd had left off.

"X.A.N.A. attacks our world pretty frequently, but nobody is supposed to remember those attacks after they happen except for us." He flapped a hand to indicate Odd, Ulrich, and Yumi. "So, we kind of need to figure out why you do."

To be continued… with 200% more Odd!

ZXCVBNM

A/N: What did you think? This time around I feel like the story is moving quicker than it has before, and I'm really excited because I'm not wasting anybody's time with useless fluff filler chapters.

Also, I'd like to thank my reviewers kgirl50 and hayleytylers! You guys both get cyber cookies, which I baked this afternoon and which are perfectly edible as long as your name is Aelita and you live in a computer. Otherwise, not so much.

So. Love it? Hate it? Lemme know. Review!


	3. In Which I Have The Weirdest Day Ever

A/N: So this chapter picks up exactly where the last one left off. I really wasn't sure about this chapter, but then it sort of took on a life of its own. I've always been big into making sure I have a defined plot before I start writing something, but I don't have that with this story. Now it's gotten down to the wire (well not really, just to where the story starts picking up) and I still don't have a plot. I was thinking about it last night as I was driving home from picking up dinner, and I decided that I'm just going to write and let the story decide which way it wants to go. I feel like it's going to create a more real story than one which seems sterile because I've plotted the heck out of it. Anybody else ever have problems like this?

ZXCVBNM

I had had the strangest day EVER.

I woke up and went to school, like normal, but in the middle of second period my older brother got attacked by a cloud of smoke and sent to the hospital. He was about to die when I sat bolt upright in my desk, still in Italian class and convinced that I'd just had the jankitiest dream ever.

Then, I got kidnapped from my lunch table by Odd Della Robbia and Jeremie Belpois, who took me to Jeremie's room and were in the process of explaining that the dream I'd told my psychology class about that morning was not a dream at all.

"X.A.N.A. attacks our world pretty frequently, but nobody is supposed to remember those attacks after they happen except for us." Jeremie flapped a hand to indicate Odd, Ulrich, and Yumi. "So, we kind of need to figure out why you do."

I was glad I was already sitting, because if I hadn't been I'm pretty sure my knees would have given out. I remember saying something in disbelief, but I don't really know how to spell it and can only say that the only reply I could come up with sounded a lot like "Huumngh?" It wasn't that I was shocked at the existence of a virtual world, it was that I didn't understand a lot of the terms that Jeremie used and therefore wasn't really affected by what he was saying. The existence of a parallel universe? No problem. The reality that my dream wasn't a dream at all? Not so much.

I sat there for a minute, the wheels turning in my brain, and realized that for everything to have happened twice…

"Did we go back in time?" I asked incredulously, my head snapping up as I realized there was no other way my morning could have happened twice, since my experience had already been disproven as a dream.

Jeremie shrugged. "We had to; your brother and Jim would have died if we hadn't."

"Couldn't you have gone back in time if they did?" I was sure Jeremie had thought of that scenario already and had the answer; still, I was curious and I couldn't resist asking.

Jeremie shook his head. "No. If someone dies in an attack you can't bring them back when you return to the past."

I frowned. "Oh, well, that's unfortunate." I thought back over my morning again. "Why did X.A.N.A. pick my brother?"

Jeremie crossed his arms. "I suspect it was because your brother was closest, not because he picked your brother specifically."

"Hm." I frowned again. "Well. Ulrich, how did you know that if I touched my brother I'd get sick?"

He smiled and shook his head. "I didn't. It was a lucky guess. It was hard enough to deal with _one_ X.A.N.A. victim. I didn't want to have to fight two of you if I could help it. I've seen Mason run. I really didn't want to have to fight both of you at once."

I said, "You know, my brother is a heck of a lot faster than me," but realized after I said it that there was no way Ulrich could have known that beforehand. It was the truth, though; Mason was reeeeeally fast and I hardly ever ran at all, so a beached whale probably could have beat me in a race. Still, Mason had come sprinting down the hall at a speed I considered supernatural, and if X.A.N.A. could do that to my brother I didn't doubt that he could have given me some kind of superhuman ability.

"Well." Jeremie was leaned back in his chair. "I think you should come to the factory with us once school is out tomorrow afternoon so we can run some tests on you. Just to make sure nothing is seriously wrong."

"Wha huh?" It was a pretty undignified response, but I hadn't understood half of what Jeremie had just said. _Factory? Tests? WHAAAT?_ In the process of trying to descrabmle whatever the jank Jeremie had just said, the only response my mouth could come up with was an undignified incoherent mumble.

"X.A.N.A.'s base of operations is in an old factory. It hasn't been used in years," Odd said. "Einstein found it last year, and that's how he discovered Lyoko and X.A.N.A. And Aelita," he added as an afterthought, waving a hand behind him to the pink-haired girl on Jeremie's computer screen.

"Look." Jeremie pushed himself out of his chair and grabbed his bookbag off the floor. "It's almost time for classes to start back. Can you meet us behind the science building after the final bell tomorrow afternoon?"

"Well…" I'd have to catch a later train back to the city and come up with an excuse to do so, since I doubted that Jeremie and Company wanted me to tell my brothers about the shenanigans my lack of short-term memory loss had gotten me into. Then I thought, _Oh what the heck_. "Sure."

ZXCVBNM

The next day I stayed out on the soccer fields watching Mason obliterate Odd and Ulrich so late that I was almost late for class. Odd and I peeled off from the rest of the group of students heading back into the main building and went to Psychology, scooting in the door just as the bell rang. Mr. Nichols was known for locking the door as the bell rang and making late students sing show tunes before he would let them in. It was hilarious if you were always in class on time, like me, but humiliating when you weren't. I had the singing voice of a sick crow, and while Odd might have been better than me at singing I had no doubt that he shared my reluctance to sing show tunes to our fellow students.

"So." Mr. Nichols slapped his hands down on his desk, where he was perched. "I have a project for you guys." He thrust a sheath of papers out and waggled them at me in a pass-these-out gesture. Various groans went throughout the classroom. Mr. Nichols smiled like the heartless fiend he was, obviously taking delight in our displeasure.

I looked down at the bundle of papers I was holding, trying to figure out exactly what it was that Mr. Nichols wanted us to do. _I_'_m going to assign you a partner_, the paper said. _I want you to keep a record of your dreams for a week, and work with your partner each day to decipher what they mean._

"This was inspired by you, you know," Mr. Nichols said, looking pointedly at me. "I've never met anyone with such a weird, detailed dream. Except maybe for Odd." Then, obviously picturing Odd in a wedding dress, Mr. Nichols coughed and turned back to his desk. Odd and Jeremie looked meaningfully at each other while I stared at my desk, ears red, wishing I'd never told Mr. Nichols about my dream, since it had gotten me in a whole heap of trouble. "Anyways. We're going to draw names out of my coffee mug, so everyone write your names on a piece of paper."

Lucky me, I got Odd. I think I've said before that Odd isn't a bad person with a drug record or three pregnant ex-girlfriends, but he is a slacker. I could just picture him sitting down next to me, declaring that he was no good at psychology, and going to sleep while I did all the hard work. If I'd been partners with Jeremie instead, we would have finished the project in record time and made an A on it. With Odd, I had no doubt that we'd be making up dreams the night before the project was due, and I doubted that I would score any higher than a high B on this project.

"What should we write about?" I asked Odd as he plunked himself down in the desk next to me.

He shrugged. "We should write about the dreams we've already had, I guess, since Mr. Nichols knows about those. Other than that…" He frowned. "Have you had any other weird dreams?"

"Well…" I'd woken up one morning when Emily was spending the night at my house (after we'd consumed our body weight in Chinese food) having dreamt that the Holy Grail was a piece of wood and I had unearthed it in the moat of our family's castle. "And," I continued, "I had this really jankity one once where I was the Princess of Thieves, and Emily and I stole the queen's sapphire boots."

"Jankity?"

I shrugged. "It's a word Emily made up, a long time ago. Actually, I think her sister started saying it one day, and then Emily picked it up, so then _I_ picked it up…" I shrugged. "I think I say it a lot more than I realize." I picked my brain for any other weird dreams I'd had. "You know, I also had one where a giant teddy bear attacked the school."

Odd snorted into a bag of pretzels he was wolfing down. "That wasn't a teddy bear, that was…" I didn't miss the significance of his pause. "It actually happened right after I met Jeremie and he discovered…" Another significant pause as Odd raised his eyebrows at me. "It's really weird how you remember all that stuff."

"All what stuff?" Mr. Nichols snatched the bag of pretzels from Odd and ate about half of them before giving it back.

Odd pointed at me. "She has the jankitiest dreams I've ever heard of," he said, folding the top of his pretzel bag over and shoving it into his bookbag. He looked like he wanted to murder Mr. Nichols but didn't quite possess the guts to do it, at least not while the aforementioned teacher was standing right next to him and was also in possession of most of Odd's afternoon snack.

"Don't you start saying it too!" I moaned, as Mr. Nichols stopped with his pretzels halfway to his mouth and said, "Jankitiest?"

"It's a long story." Odd zipped his bag shut as Mr. Nichols wandered off, and I wondered whether he was abandoning our work in the middle of class. He must have known what I was thinking, because he smiled (smirked, really) at me, and pointed to the clock on the wall behind me. "Bell's about to ring. Pretzel?"

He was right about the bell ringing. So I kicked back in my desk, waiting out the last few minutes of class, and split the rest of Odd's pretzels with him.

ZXCVBNM

After school, Mason found me as I stood at my locker, hastily changing out my books before heading to the Science Building.

"What was that all about yesterday? I never did get a chance to ask you," He said, leaning up against the side of my locker like the oh-so-suave character he was.

"Nothing. They just wanted to ask me about something." I closed my locker and cleared it, then checked to make sure it wouldn't open.

"Hm." Mason knew me well enough not to push it any further, but I'll bet you a hundred dollars he wanted to.

"But listen. I need to stay late to do something this afternoon, so can you tell Dad I'll be on another train home?"

"Sure," he nodded. "What do you need to do?"

Well, jank. I was trying to be deliberately vague, but Mason was ruining my plans. Still, I was a pretty good liar, and sometimes not even my own brother could tell when I wasn't telling the truth. I flapped my hand in dismissal of his question. "Just… Homework. I have a project due in a couple days, so some of us are going to stay late to work on it." It wasn't _really_ a lie, I thought. I was staying late to work on a project, just one that was Lyoko-related, not school-related.

"'Kay. I'm going to find Jake." Jake could find his way around the school with no problem, but his locker was a floor below ours and we usually just came to collect him after school was over instead of making him take the stairs twice.

"Bye!" I waved at Mason as he disappeared down the hall, then turned back to my locker.

Jeremie hadn't said to bring anything special, so I headed toward the science building, more than a little nervous. He'd said 'run some tests', but I wasn't sure what all that entailed. Were they medical tests, with needles and blood involved? I couldn't quite fathom what else it could be.

I hated needles. Every year I got the flu, and every year except two it had sent me to the hospital. I was sick of being poked and prodded with needles.

Still. What would Jeremie need my blood for, anyways? And what would he do with it once he had it?

I was still pondering that question when I found them behind the science building, where they said they'd be, sans backpacks. In retrospect it would have made more sense to leave mine in my locker until we were done with whatever the jank it was that we were about to do, but I guess hindsight is always 20/20, right? Well, there was no helping it now.

ZXCVBNM

"The _sewer_?" I asked, staring down the hole in front of me and trying not to breathe too much.

"Yup." Jeremie, Ulrich, and Yumi had already gone down, and as Odd disappeared, he called up, "You'd better come or we're going to leave you behind!"

Like _that_ was going to get me moving. Still, I was curious about X.A.N.A., and especially curious about what it was that made me remember his attacks. I couldn't think of a single time when X.A.N.A. had done anything to me personally, but I thought that if he had done something to me he might be sneaky enough about it that I either didn't realize it or didn't remember it afterward. X.A.N.A. sounded like a right disreputable character, given what I already knew about him, and I really didn't want to get on his bad side. But I figured I was _already_ on his bad side, if I was remembering his attacks on my school, and if that was the case then the safest place I could be was with someone who knew how to defeat him, so down the hole I went.

We got to the factory, where we all slid down ropes and then took an elevator down a couple floors. I leaned against the back of the wall, nursing my rope-burned palms. They stung like nobody's business, my skin red and raw.

"Happened to me the first time I went down, too," Odd said, holding his palms out to me and displaying some impressive calluses. "You get calluses eventually."

"You imply that I'll be doing this more than once." I raised my eyebrows at him. Nobody had said anything to me about coming here more than once, and if asked to come back I wasn't sure I would agree. It sort of all depended on what Jeremie did to me (read: whether or not he poked me with a giant needle).

The elevator stopped suddenly and Jeremie stepped out into a room with a huge computer. I wondered if I should step out and follow him, but Odd and the others seemed like they weren't going to follow him. I did the awkward shuffle while I tried to decide what to do. Jeremie turned around and said, "You guys go on to Lyoko," and that decided it.

We went down another floor to a room with these… Well, they looked like coffins. I said so out loud, to no one in particular, and Ulrich snorted.

"That's what I said the first time I came here." He gave me a smile which I think he thought would be comforting but was really just even more disconcerting.

"It's really okay. Nobody's died yet." Odd poked me between the shoulder blades and steered me into one of the coffins. "It's a scanner."

"Because that makes me more inclined to get in it," I said. "What does it do?"

"It works by breaking up your particles, digitizing them, and recreating them on Lyoko." Jeremie's voice floated down from the ceiling, so I figured he'd heard the conversation thus far. "Simply put, you get in and you go to Lyoko. It's safe. It'll be fine."

"Well…" I was already in it, so there wasn't much I could do when the door started to close. There was a bright light and a blast of hot air, and then the world went dark.

ZXCVBNM

When I opened my eyes again I was floating twenty feet off the ground. Then I literally fell out of the sky and landed in a heap on the dirt.

The first thing I noticed was that I looked like a video game character, having adopted a 3D appearance somewhere between Earth and Lyoko. I also looked like a hippy. My hair was piled up on the back of my head in a messy bun, and I was barefoot. I was wearing a green top which had one short sleeve and came in a diagonal line a little past my hip, and a green knee-length skirt over brown footless tights. I also had on a headscarf.

I took a good look around me. We were in the middle of what looked like Antarctica, but I wasn't cold. I also realized I couldn't breathe. Not that my nose was stopped up, or that I had terrible chest congestion; I physically could not get air from my nose to my lungs. I almost panicked, but then I realized that I didn't need to breathe. I didn't need to gasp for air. I think it made sense, since I was in a digital world and air didn't really exist. Ulrich and Yumi were dressed like a Samurai and a Geisha, but Odd…

"Do you have… a tail?" I asked him, exploding into helpless giggles. "And _paws_?"

He shot me a scathing glare. "I didn't pick it. Einstein thinks the computer reads into your subconscious and creates a character around that."

"Hm. Well. Now what?" I asked, looking around me. We really were in Antarctica. I didn't see anything but ice and snow, no matter which way I looked.

"This way." The others took off at a run. I thought, _oh great_, because a beached whale really could have beaten me in a foot race, but then I remembered that I didn't have to breathe and so I would never run out of air. That was always my problem with running. It wasn't that I got tired, or that my muscles hurt, it was that I always ran out of air and I hated the feeling of not being able to breathe.

We came to a white tower sticking up from the ground. There was no door. How were we supposed to get in? But the others just walked straight through the wall, and so did I.

The pink-haired girl… Aelita, was that her name? She was standing inside the tower.

"Well, _that's_ interesting." Jeremie's voice floated down from the ceiling and I looked up, just to see if he was sitting somewhere above me. He wasn't. That also made sense, as someone had to stay behind and manage things from Earth.

"What's interesting, Einstein?" Odd asked.

"On my screen, you, Yumi, and Ulrich show up as green arrows, and Aelita shows up as a red arrow. So does Parker."

"Weird." Ulrich eyed me curiously. "I wonder why that is."

"I don't know," Jeremie said. "I'm trying to figure that out." He paused for a minute, then said, "Parker? Try touching the floating screen."

"The floating…" I turned around and saw it. "Oh."

The second my hand touched the screen a shock of electricity went up my arm and spread through my body. My whole person tingled from the top of my scalp all the way down to my toes.

The world went dark for a while. I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, I didn't feel anything; I wasn't even really aware that I had a body for a while. I just drifted along in the blackness until suddenly a pinpoint of light appeared in my vision, getting bigger and bigger until the rushing sound in my ears overwhelmed me.

I guess I came back to myself after that, because I opened my eyes to find myself lying flat on the platform of the tower with Odd, Yumi, Ulrich, and Aelita peering worriedly down at me.

"Are you okay?" Jeremie asked me.

"I think so?" I rubbed a hand over my face. I felt like I'd just been hit by a bus. "I have no idea what just happened. I just saw… black." That probably made no sense, but my brain seemed disinclined to make sense anytime soon. "What _did _happen?" I looked up at the ceiling, like Jeremie would be there and he could tell me what was going on.

"I have no idea," Jeremie answered. "Nothing's changed from here."

"Weird." I'd probably heard the word 'weird' said more times in this one day alone than I had in the last three years of my life. "Well, any other ideas, Jeremie?"

I could almost see him shaking his head, eyebrows pinched in concentration. "None. You should probably get out of there. That was strange, and I don't want to risk waking X.A.N.A. up with Parker there."

"Okay." I was more than ready to go home. This had been the strangest day ever in my sixteen years of existence, and I was happy to be going back to the normalcy of my home life. None of the others even seemed fazed, but I guess they wouldn't have been if they did this kind of thing on a day-to-day basis.

When we got back to the computer room with Jeremie, I had a lot of questions. What the jank had just happened to me? Why didn't Aelita come back with us? And why, oh why, did I remember their little escapades?

But Jeremie had no answers. "It's the strangest thing I've ever seen," he said. "X.A.N.A.'s pretty unpredictable, but even I wasn't expecting this. I'll keep searching, and I'll let you know when I find something."

ZXCVBNM

I decided to eat dinner on campus, since it was already seven PM and my brothers were rather notorious for "forgetting" to leave latecomers or stragglers any dinner. Odd practically ran through the dinner line, and was almost done with his food by the time I sat down. I learned that Rosa usually cut him off after his second time through, and that he usually ate most of Ulrich's dinner as well as his own.

"How do you _eat_ so much?" I asked him. "You're so little and scrawny…"

He gave me another scathing glare (I swear, if looks could kill…) and said, "I'm SVELTE."

"Svelte, is it? That's just a fancy Norwegian word for scrawny." I raised my eyebrows at him and watched in awe as he neatly dispatched of an entire chicken leg in about four bites. "Seriously. Where does it all _go_?" He didn't answer, his mouth full of a roll. I searched for a word to describe him and settled on one I'd learned in Italian class that morning. "Pico. That's what you are."

"I'm _from_ Italy. And that is not what that word means," He said with great dignity.

"Well, anyways," I said sometime later, "it's time for me to go." I slapped my hands down on the table, having dispatched of my own dinner.

I waved at them as I left the building. As I rounded the corner I peered in through one of the windows. They were already back in a deep discussion, probably about Lyoko, and I wondered how much they had kept a secret.

Odd had been pretty forthcoming with the information, but the rest of them had kept their mouths shut. I wondered if Odd had only told me so much because he thought that Jeremie would find the bug in the program and fix it, thereby eliminating my memories of what I'd just learned. I doubted it, though. Odd seemed like the kind of person who wouldn't have told me about Lyoko at all if it wasn't something he wanted me to remember.

I was still trying to decide how much Jeremie and Company had kept a secret from me as I walked in the door to my house.

To be continued… with 185% more unanswered questions!

ZXCVBNM

A/N: Yeesh. This was one long chapter—nine pages, size eleven Calibri font. And I didn't see about half of this coming. It's to be expected; I'm only the author, and it's really the characters who decide where this thing goes. Seriously. Once I decided to let this story be alive, it has come alive in a huge way.

Anyways. So I had no idea that Parker was going to get zapped by the touch screen of death, but it sort of makes sense (I think). I'm new to the whole letting-the-characters-decide-where-the-story-goes thing, but I'm trying. Hard. And Parker's zappage kindasorta gave me a vague idea of what I want to happen down the road, maybe.

So. Now I'm going to read over this and decide how I feel about it, and then I'm going to post it so you guys can review (because you totally know you want to review, right?).

So. Love it? Hate it? Let me know.

Thanks to:

HayleyTylers

Lavender Moonlight In The Snow

And my sister, who helped me figure out what this chapter wanted to do with itself.


	4. In Which I Meet The Smoke Monster

A/N: Chapter four! Who's excited? I AM! I have no idea what this chapter wants to do with itself, but I guess we'll find out by the end of it! I feel like I'm watching a movie with baited breath; I quite literally have no clue where this is going. I'm just as in the dark as all of you. It's kind of fun!

ALSO: I found out that Emily's name is actually spelled Emilie, so I've gone through and edited/posted edited chapters with that change. And Aelita actually shows up on Jeremie's computer as a yellow arrow, not a red one, so I've fixed that too. Funny, the kinds of things you can find on Wikipedia.

I got stuck on this chapter, so I've gone back through the previous three chapters and made some pretty substantial revisions. You might want to check it out. It's nothing plot-altering, but I've added some descriptions and some conversations which may or may not become crucial later—I wouldn't know, as I have no idea where this is going.

So. Story. Enjoy!

ZXCVBNM

My family was gathered around a game of Scrabble when I walked in the door, in absolute silence and in the deepest concentration. My family played Scrabble like rednecks watched NASCAR—and we were good at it. My dad, being an English teacher, was unusually good at Scrabble, but us kids could hold our own against him. Even Papa, old as he was, kicked some serious tuckus. The only people who played as a team were Jake and Dan, because Jake couldn't see but Dan was dumb. My dad joked that together they made up a whole person. Jake could memorize the words already on the board and the letters he had in his hand, then tell Dan what to spell. Sometimes, I thought that kid was too smart for his own good.

I sat there for a while and watched, but since I had come home late I wasn't part of the game. Once Scrabble Round One ended, my dad gave me a handful of letters and told me to bring my game pants. I rolled my eyes at him. Being French, my dad sometimes had difficulties with the American slang that got tossed around our house, courtesy of the older boys and their globetrotting shenanigans.

"Game _face_," I muttered at him, trying desperately to think of a word I could spell with two Qs and an X. There was quorum, quandary, quibble, and quaffle, although the latter wasn't technically a Scrabble word. My dad would probably let it slide. As for the x, though…

"Aha!" I played off of the S that Eric had laid down for _soup_ and spelled _xhosa (_it's a word. Google it).

"So. How was your meeting tonight?" Mason asked me as he laid down _quorum_. I frowned. I still had _quandary_ and _quibble_, but if Mason kept laying down Q words I was going to have nothing to do with my friends the awkward Qs.

"My what? Oh." He'd almost caught me off guard. I was _thisclose_ to saying I hadn't had a meeting. I sighed, trying to look like I was contemplating my next scrabble move when I was really trying to figure out what the jank I was going to tell my family. "It was good. We got a lot done."

"Mm." Mason stopped talking since he was trying to figure out what to do. That didn't, however, stop Eric from asking me questions.

"What's your project about?" We had completed the scrabble circle, so Eric laid down _snow_ (not one for the big words, my brother).

"Psychology. I have to decode my dreams with Odd and Jeremie."

"Oh, on a first name basis, are you?" Mason nudged me in the side with his elbow and made a lewd gesture with his eyebrows. "I thought you liked Ulrich."

"I do, you dolt." It was my turn, so I laid down _Santa_. "They're in my Psych class, and I just got unlucky enough to be paired with them." That wasn't entirely the truth—I was partnered with Odd, just not with Jeremie, much to my dismay.

"Belpois?" My dad asked. "Isn't he that smart kid? And Della Robbia. I think I failed him last year."

"You probably did. I don't think he's known for getting epic grades."

"Which is why you didn't want to be his partner." Dad laid down _tree_ off of the t that someone had laid down for _Christmas_. "But Belpois is with you. I'm sure you'll do fine."

"Yep. Can we talk about something besides school? I don't want to think about psychology ever again." That was a lie. I just didn't want to incriminate myself by lying about anything I didn't have to.

Mason nudged me in the side and waggled his eyebrows in that lewd gesture again. "Someone have dirty dreams?"

I stomped on his toes underneath the table and grinned in satisfaction when he yelped. "No. Stuff it. Nightmares, is more accurate."

"Care to share?" Dad asked. He never discussed things like _feelings_ or _dreams_ with the boys, but I think he thought that because I was a girl I worked differently than them and needed to talk about stuff with him that the boys didn't. That was true sometimes, but there were things I never ever wanted to talk about with my dad. Like my period. I try hard to forget that conversation.

"No." I laid down _tinsel_ off of the _e_ in _tree_. "It's not a big deal, it was just weird."

ZXCVBNM

Being the only girl in the family, I got my own room while everyone else shared (except for Dad. And Papa). When eight people live in a teeny tiny house, you have to share spaces, and that's just all there is to it. My family had actually converted the cellar (because that's what they're called in France, not basements) into a huge room for Dan, Eric, and Connor. We never really thought about the cramped quarters around Chez McNealson; it's just the way things were around home. Nobody made a big deal out of it.

I loved my room. The walls were an off-white color which most people would have found boring but I found extremely calming, especially on nights like tonight when a whole lot of weird stuff had happened. It was small, but that was what I needed. I found it a whole lot easier to keep small spaces cleaner than big ones, and if there was one thing I absolutely despised it was a mess. I could abide by dirty clothes on the floor, but clutter drove me absolutely insane. I was effectively a minimalist, if you wanted to call it that. If it wasn't in my room, I didn't need it.

My room also had a giant picture window situated right behind my bed. When I was smaller, I used to climb over the headboard of my bed and sit on the window seat, looking out across the yard to the shimmering lights of the city off in the distance. I sat on my bed for a while and contemplated sleeping, but it was only 8:30 and I was too wound up and agitated to sleep anyways. Given what I had experienced earlier that day, agitation was an acceptable emotion to feel. I looked behind me to the window; I wasn't sure I would still be able to fit, but over the headboard I went anyway.

It was cramped, but that didn't matter. I snatched a blanket off my bed and wrapped up in it, then opened the window and let the cool night air flow through my room. I leaned my head back against the wall, closed my eyes, and began to think.

Jeremie hadn't given me any answers. I didn't know much about computers, and I doubted I was going to come away with any more knowledge than I already had, but it was worth a shot. So. I was a weirdo. I remembered things that no one else was supposed to remember, and had issues with whatever part of Lyoko managed the floating screen of death. I'd blacked out on Lyoko once I touched it. And I showed up as a yellow arrow on Jeremie's computer screen, whatever that meant.

Now that I looked back on it, I could remember several super strange dreams I'd had which I had previously chalked up to too many onion rings right before bed. Like: once, I'd had a dream that something really jankity was happening with the city's power lines, and the stored electricity was a threat to the nuclear power plant, which was likely to blow up if the electricity didn't dissipate. I'd dreamed that two trains carrying toxic chemicals were about to crash into each other, poisoning the whole city. In another one of my dreams, THE James Finson had come to school to make a movie, but his Alien prop was surprisingly lifelike and started taking hostages. And just a few days earlier, my cell phone had gone off, along with everyone else's, in the middle of class had been confiscated, along with everyone else's phones. Sissi had started this ridiculous protest, but I figured it was my own fault for having my phone in class and didn't join. Then, while I was in psychology (sans Odd and Jeremie, which I thought was strange at the time but now made sense) explosions had started happening outside.

Were none of those dreams? I remembered being bathed in a white light at the end of each dream shortly before I woke up, which was strong evidence that my dreams were, in fact, X.A.N.A. attacks. But why did I remember them if nobody was supposed to?

I hadn't encountered X.A.N.A. directly that I could ever remember, so nothing made sense. Even though I couldn't remember it, though, that didn't mean he hadn't done something to me. Frustrated, I pushed myself off the window seat, climbed over my headboard and grabbed my towel from the hook on my door. Hot showers worked wonders when I was trying to calm down, although, I reflected as I stared at my haunted expression in the mirror of the medicine cabinet in our bathroom, I doubted that a shower was going to do it tonight. So I grabbed a bottle of Nyquil from the medicine cabinet and took a good swig before I climbed in the shower.

By the time I climbed out I was pleasantly sleepy and muzzy headed. I pitched headfirst into the pile of pillows on my bed, fell asleep almost instantly, and thankfully, had no more dreams.

ZXCVBNM

The next morning we left for school earlier than usual, due to the fact that Mason had a track meet that morning and Jake and I didn't want to bother with riding the train alone. I was only fifteen, after all, and you can encounter some pretty sketchy characters on the train no matter what time of day it is. Mason might only weigh a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, but he was better protection against wingnuts and whackjobs than Jake or Echo would be—because even though Echo was 98 pounds of ferocious-looking mutt, he was also 98 pounds of chicken and I strongly suspected that he would turn tail and run away if confronted.

I stared out the window of the train as we rode to school, still trying to reason out what could have happened. I think Mason noticed something was up because halfway to the city he sat down beside me and stared at me with his eyebrows raised.

"What?" I asked, a little uneasy that my brother's stares could be so scrutinizing.

"What's got your goat?" He questioned me, crossing one ankle over the other. "You've been acting funny since you talked to Ulrich and them the other day. Did they do something to you?"

I laughed. "No. It's really nothing; I'm just brooding about my psychology project. Mr. Nichols wants us to analyze our dreams, but I almost never remember mine so I'm not sure what I should do."

Mason rolled his eyes. "I know you're not telling the truth. But fine, if you don't want to talk to me about it then don't."

"Mason." I poked him harder than was quite necessary in the shoulder. He smiled at me, and I knew he was only faking anger.

"I think it's because Ulrich asked you on a date, and you didn't know how to tell us."

"Yes. That's _exactly_ what happened." I rolled my eyes at him.

"I knew it. You have a crush the size of a house on him. Every time you stare at him at lunch your eyes turn into little hearts. Ouch!"

I grinned maliciously as I ground my heel into his toes. "Shut up. I can look, right? He _is_ good looking…"

"I don't want to have this conversation with you anymore!" Mason shouted, and when I tried to continue he stuck his hands over his ears and shouted "La la la la la la!"

I rolled my eyes at him and settled back against the window of the train with my iPod.

ZXCVBNM

As soon as we walked in the front gate of the school, Mason peeled off and went to the gym so he could dress out and get on the bus for the track meet. I waved at him as he disappeared, then turned to Jake and led the way toward the main building, Echo trailing obediently behind us.

Before we got there, though, I saw Jeremie and Company occupying a bench. I grabbed Jake by the elbow. "Hey," I said, slowing to a stop so he didn't walk off and leave me. "I'm going to talk to Jeremie about something. I'll see you later, okay?"

His eyebrows pinched together, so I knew he was squinting at me from behind the aviator sunglasses he always wore. Not that he could even see me, but still. He was trying to stare me down. "Is everything okay?"

"It's fine," I said, glad he couldn't see my facial expressions, because he would have probably known I was lying. "It's really not a big deal, I just need to ask him about something."

He frowned at me. "When have you ever needed to ask Jeremie Belpois about something in your life?"

"I'm allowed to make new friends, aren't I? Just because Emilie…" I started to bite back, and then immediately regretted even mentioning Emilie's name. Jake's reaction was what I figured it would be; he said nothing, but heaved a frustrated, angry sigh, turned on his heel, and walked away.

ZXCVBNM

"Is everything all right?" Ulrich asked me when I broke into his circle.

"It's fine." I said, for about the millionth time that morning, flapping my hand because it really _wasn't_ that big of a deal. "People get into disagreements. I just said something I shouldn't have."

"Hm." Odd raised his eyebrows at me. "I hear that. I've got five sisters, and we fight all the time."

"Straight up. I love having so many brothers, but sometimes I just want to choke 'em." I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair, making it stand on end, I'm sure, like porcupine spikes. "Anyways. Jeremie. I came to ask if you'd figured anything else out about our predicament?"

He pushed his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose and smiled. "I did, actually. I can't tell you about it here. Can you meet us after school?"

I shook my head. "If I stay late twice in one week my family will start to get suspicious. Can we meet another time?"

"Hm." He frowned. "Could you meet us during lunch instead?" He asked.

I figured I should probably stay and keep Jake company, but then again, I doubted he would be willing to speak to me before we got home since I'd brought Emilie into the mix. Whatever. He could be angry if he wanted to. "Lunch is great," I said, feeling simultaneous guilt for abandoning my brother and making him angry in the first place.

"In the meantime, will you try to think of any other dreams you've had that could also be X.A.N.A. attacks? I think it might be helpful toward figuring out what's going on."

The warning bell rang in the distance. "I need to go," I said, doing the awkward backward shuffle as I tried to break out of the circle. We still had fifteen minutes until classes started, but I had to walk from my current location to my locker in the main building, and from there to the math building, and it was quite a hike.

"I'll go with you." Odd hopped up from the bench, much to my surprise. "I've got math first thing in the morning too. I hate it."

I nodded. "Yup. Algebra II is terrible. What math are you in?"

"Geometry." He rolled his eyes. "It's terrible! I didn't get the math gene."

"Neither did I," I grinned at him. "My brothers did, though."

"And yet here you are, in Algebra II." He rolled his eyes at me. "It's okay, though. I'd rather make origami than take a geometry test."

I laughed. My dad had taught Odd in English last year, and had brought home a briefcase full of Odd's origami tests to show us one day. I didn't even know it was possible to create an origami elephant, but Odd had done it.

"I think I'd rather do almost anything than take a geometry test." We were at my locker and I frowned as I spun the dial. I never forgot my combination, but I frequently messed the combination up because of awkwardly skinny fingers. "I hated geometry. People say you're either good at one or the other, and Algebra is definitely my forte."

He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled ruefully. "Do I have to have a forte? Cause I don't."

ZXCVBNM

At lunch I stalked right past Jake, who probably didn't notice my stalking because he was buried in a book, and plunked my lunch bag down on the table next to Odd. Something inside it made a _klunk___sound, and I wondered curiously what kind of shenanigans Connor had put in my lunch before I unearthed the culprit—a can of peaches. I pulled the tab and peeled back the metal lid, then dug in with a fork.

Odd made a face at my choice of food. "Gross," he said, spearing a brussels sprout with his fork and looking away.

"You don't like peaches?" I asked in surprise. Odd seemed like a human garbage disposal. I hadn't figured there would be anything he wouldn't eat. Apparently, I was mistaken.

"Wrong. I love peaches. I don't like food in its own snot, and that," he pointed at the syrup in which my peaches were floating, "most definitely counts as snot."

I choked on my peach, which suddenly seemed much less appetizing. "Thanks for the mental image," I muttered, leaning the fork against the side of the can.

"Guys!" Jeremie's voice cut through our friendly squabble, and I realized he'd been trying to get our attention for a while. "Listen."

Obediently, I turned to look at Jeremie. Odd was less obedient, halfway ignoring Jeremie in favor of his Brussels sprouts.

"Allright." Jeremie pushed his glasses up higher on his nose. "Here's what I've got." He laid down a screenshot of our Lyoko arrows. True to his word, Odd, Yumi, and Ulrich all showed up as green arrows, while Aelita and I showed up as yellow arrows. "I've thought about it a lot, but I couldn't think of any reason why your arrow should be yellow. So I attacked the problem from a different angle and thought of reasons that Aelita's arrow is yellow. And I realized that it's most likely because she's a part of the program—she's a part of Lyoko."

"Does that mean _I'm _a part of Lyoko?" I asked in shock. "How can… I don't… Why?"

"I don't know. But yes, I think that the color of your arrow indicates that you are, in fact, a part of Lyoko. Do you remember anything strange ever happening to you? Like a X.A.N.A. attack, only aimed at _you_?"

I shook my head. "I remember some attacks, but they all involved other people. And nothing ever happened to me during them."

"Hm." Jeremie frowned. "Well, when did your dreams start? What's the earliest one you can remember?"

I thought back over all the X.A.N.A. attacks I was sure of and tried to place them in order. At last I shook my head. "I can't remember which one came first, but I remember a giant teddy bear attacking the school, and I remember the power lines close to the nuclear power plant storing too much electricity."

"The teddy bear came first. That was actually the very first X.A.N.A. attack. There was one before that, but it was concentrated around the four of us," He waved at the other inhabitants of the table, "and I don't think you would have experienced it to remember it. It seems to me that you only remember the attacks you experienced, not the ones aimed at us."

"What does it mean?" Yumi asked, as I asked, "What should I do?"

Jeremie pulled his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I don't know. I think…" He sighed. "I think that when you can get away with it, you should come back to Lyoko with us. I had to cut the last test short because of what happened with the touch screen, but there are a couple more things I want to try. When can you work it out?"

"Not until later this week, I don't think. I'm sorry. If I keep staying late my family's going to get suspicious."

Jeremie smiled. "It's okay. I don't think you're in any immediate danger. I think it's just better if we figure out what's going on as quickly as we can. I think…" He paused. "It's interesting that you remember the attacks all the way back to when they first started. If X.A.N.A. _is_ a part of this, I don't understand how he could have done something to you before I turned the supercomputer on. Maybe he attacked you during that first attack on the four of us?" He raised his eyebrows at me.

"It's possible, I guess," I conceded. "But I don't remember anything ever happening to me before that teddy bear assault on the school. If X.A.N.A. did something to me before that, I don't know about it."

"It doesn't make sense that you would remember everything but that one attack." Ulrich said, propping his chin up on his hands and staring down the table at me. "X.A.N.A.'s never done anything like this before."

Yumi nodded in agreement. "You're right. If she remembers everything else, it seems like she should remember the first attack she experienced."

Jeremie pinched the bridge of his nose again—a nervous habit, I guess. "I don't know. This is really _weird_. I think our best chance of finding some answers is in running some more tests." He looked at me. "Let us know what time works for you, and we'll try to get this figured out."

ZXCVBNM

In Psychology I sat in my usual desk, Odd to my left and Jeremie to _his_ left, as Mr. Nichols lectured about Freud and what a wacko he was. Mr. Nichols didn't actually call Freud a wacko, but after hearing some of his psychological theories I came to that conclusion on my own.

It was an ordinary class until something in Jeremie's messenger bag beeped. Mr. Nichols stopped pacing the room and turned on his heel to give Jeremie the stink eye. Jeremie paled, his already white skin turning an unnatural shade of grey. He quickly withdrew a laptop and pushed the power button, and the obnoxious beeping ceased. Mr. Nichols, pleased to have control of his classroom once again, turned back to Freud and his theories.

Jeremie didn't. At least, not fully. He turned his eyes back to the lesson but sketched idly in the margin of his paper, an action completely out of his character. I wasn't really watching him, being too interested in Freud and his Oedipus complex, but when I glanced over at Jeremie's paper I knew exactly why his computer had been beeping.

Jeremie had drawn X.A.N.A.'s eye.

Odd saw what I saw. Quick on the uptake, he suddenly clutched his stomach, groaned, and doubled over in mock pain, his eyes clenched shut. He gave a very good impression of a bad case of indigestion, something I figured he had some considerable experience with. Mr. Nichols stopped teaching again and looked fully prepared to give Odd the stink eye, but the withering glare fell short once Mr. Nichols decided that Odd was not, in fact, faking his stomach ache.

"I must have had too many Brussels sprouts," Odd lied, leaning over to put his head between his knees.

"I'll take him to the infirmary!" Jeremie volunteered, literally springing out of his seat and slinging his messenger bag over one shoulder and Odd's backpack over the other before Mr. Nichols had a chance to protest. The two shuffled out of the room, Odd clutching his side, until they disappeared around a corner down the hall. Once they turned the corner Mr. Nichols may have missed the sound of two pairs of feet sprinting down the hallway, but I didn't.

"Well. That was strange." Mr. Nichols said, peering out the door to where Odd and Jeremie had disappeared. He shook his head and turned back to the class. "All right. Worksheets." He passed a stack of worksheets down each row, then sat behind his desk and propped his feet up with his arms behind his head and promptly turned the classroom's TV on to the sports channel.

I only halfway paid attention to my worksheet because I was thinking about X.A.N.A. and wondering what kind of shenanigans he was causing outside of my little Freud bubble. I looked back down at my worksheet and absentmindedly circled an answer without really thinking about it, and when I looked back up there was a cloud of smoke staring me in the face.

To be continued… with 135% more strangely colored computer arrows!

ZXCVBNM

I'm sorry that it took me this lamentably long to post again—I had finals at school. I also make journals to keep myself fed, and as soon as I got back into town one of the stores I sell them through placed a mammoth order, so I've been working nonstop for the better part of two days to get all the journals made in time. I'm done now, and I've decided that except for one more journal making spurt sometime tomorrow I'll be devoting my whole week to the finishing of this chapter! Not that you guys know, because by the time that you read this I'll be finished writing, but I still feel the need to explain myself.

So. Love it? Hate it? Lemme know.


	5. In Which I Feel Like Jello

A/N: I am, once again, writing this right after I posted the last chapter. I'd actually meant for them to be one chapter, but I got stuck there at the end and decided that it was probably a better idea to split the chapter into two parts to avoid posting an entire novel in one go. Anyways, since I had already planned to have this chapter as a part of the last it's already sort of planned and I'm afraid that because it's been planned already it's going to be a little bit stale. We'll see.

ZXCVBNM

Previously on Live Love Lie….

_When I looked back up there was a cloud of smoke staring me in the face. _

I shrieked, causing my classmates' heads to snap up and everyone in the classroom to stare at me, including Mr. Nichols, who leapt up from his desk at my scream. I tried to shove myself out of my desk to run but got tangled in the legs of my seat, casting myself sideways onto the floor in a tangled heap of metal and flesh. I couldn't budge.

Then the smoke monster flew into me. Not "flew into me and bounced off" or "bumped into me". The smoke monster_ flew into me_ and we became one. The same person. The same being. I possessed X.A.N.A., and he possessed me.

I could try to tell you how much it hurt, but there really just aren't adequate words. It felt like I had licked my finger and stuck it in a light socket. Little arcs of electricity ran through my skin and my head hurt more than it has ever hurt in my life. It was, hands down, the worst pain I've ever encountered. I'm sure I was screaming bloody murder, but I couldn't focus on anything except how much every part of me _hurt_. My head felt like it was going to explode, and then it felt like it _did _explode and all of a sudden I couldn't hear anymore. I tried to raise my hand to see if my ears were bleeding like Mason's had been, but I suddenly realized I had no control over my arms. Or the rest of my body. I was locked in a heap on the floor and I couldn't move at all.

I don't know how long I stayed that way—it felt like an eternity, but it was probably no more than a few seconds. I was frozen in a tangled heap of desk and Parker, unable to move and free myself. It was like someone who actually was being electrocuted; they would remain, immobile, while the volts of electric current running through their body made it impossible for them to free themselves.

Time suddenly started again, and I began to shake. Shake isn't really the best word to describe what was happening to me, and the word "earthquake" might be better suited to my purposes. It felt like an earthquake was going through my body. Suddenly a whooshing sound began in my ears, and all of a sudden I could hear again, at least enough to hear my classmates screaming and Mr. Nichols yelling for someone to find the nurse.

I guess I must have fainted because I came to myself just a few seconds later with a whopper of a headache and limbs that felt like jelly. I tried to lift a hand experimentally and found that yes, although I felt like I had the coordination of a blob of snot, I _could_ move. I had control over myself and that meant, of course, that X.A.N.A. no longer inhabited my body.

I heaved a sigh of relief and disentangled my legs from the legs of the desk, then rolled myself onto my stomach and tried to stand up. I succeeded but wobbled from side to side since my legs still had the strength of jello. Someone grabbed me under the elbow—Mr. Nichols, I realized, as the spinning world suddenly focused on him—and towed me out of the classroom.

"What _was_ that?" He asked once we rounded the corner. I was still shuffling along with all the speed of a crippled turtle stuck in molasses (in winter) but at least I _was_ walking.

"I don't know any better than you," I said. I hoped he couldn't tell that I was lying; most teachers came equipped with an excellent BS detector, but given the gravity of the situation I didn't think that Mr. Nichols would be overly concerned with analyzing everything I said for traces of BS. I figured he was really more concerned with making sure I didn't die in the middle of the hall, or in his classroom, or _on_ him on our way to the infirmary.

"Well." He said, as we stumbled down the hall like two drunken comrades. "That was one of the stranger things I've seen."

"Not the strangest?" What had happened to Mason, and now to me, _had _been the strangest thing I'd ever seen, except maybe for Lyoko. No, actually, Lyoko took the cake by a long shot, but this came in second.

Mr. Nichols shook his head. "Ever seen the miracle of birth firsthand?"

"OOOkay." I said, scrunching my nose and trying to clear my head of the image that popped into it; a few days earlier we'd watched a video about giving birth in our mandatory after school sex ed class. It was disgusting. "No, I haven't. At least, not firsthand."

"Well." Mr. Nichols cleared his throat and had the decency to look abashed at discussing the miracle of birth with a student. "It's quite the experience."

ZXCVBNM

Mr. Nichols deposited me in the infirmary in the excellent care of Nurse Dorothy, who assured him that I was in no immediate danger of dying and would have no lasting side effects of whatever had happened.

"What did happen?" She asked me, but then promptly stuck a thermometer in my mouth so that I couldn't communicate. A few minutes later the thermometer beeped and she took it, grunting as she stared at the display. "Normal," she answered when I raised my eyebrows at her.

"What happened?" She asked me again, this time accosting me with the blood pressure cuff. I yelped as she stuck the cold stethoscope on my wrist. Nurse Dorothy rolled her eyes and warmed the cold metal with her breath, then stuck it back on my wrist intently.

"Well…" I started to say, but she shushed me, flapping a hand in my face and pointing to the stethoscope with a look of intense concentration. I sighed and leaned back on the pillow of the hospital bed, deciding to give up on trying to tell Nurse Dorothy the real story. Maybe if I thought about it hard enough she could learn it by telepathy.

I was alive, but that didn't mean that I felt fabulous. Every few minutes one of my muscles would twitch from residual electricity, and I still had a whopper of a headache. There was dried blood on the side of my face from where my ears had bled, and I vaguely wondered whether my eardrums had burst but realized that for that to have been true I wouldn't have been hearing the shufflings and rustlings of Nurse Dorothy as she fluttered around the infirmary, taking care of a particularly nasty strain of a stomach bug and handling a broken arm without much care. I hoped never to encounter Nurse Dorothy when I had a broken bone. She looked like she was being rough on purpose.

My limbs still felt like overcooked noodles, too. I could move, but when I raised my hand to brush my hair out of my face my arms started to shake after a few seconds. Now that I was sitting down again I wasn't sure that I could stand up on my own without falling in a heap on the floor. When Mason had been attacked he'd stood up and sprinted down the hall at a speed that could only be considered superhuman, but that was because X.A.N.A. was controlling him. It wasn't that X.A.N.A. was still possessing me—I think I would have known, and at any case he wasn't controlling my movements so I was pretty sure I was still my own person—it was that the residual effects of his brief moment of control left me twitching and hurting like a blob of jello that someone had smacked with a canoe paddle. Multiple times.

I think I dozed off, because I woke up with someone's terrible breath in my face. I groaned and tried to swat the person away only to have them bark at me. I cracked open one eyelid to see Jake and Mason sitting on the foot of my bed, with Echo's nose just a few inches away from mine and his paws on the railing of the bed. My dad was standing behind them with his arms crossed, looking at me in intense speculation.

"What happened?" He asked me, nudging Echo away from my face and taking his place. "You look like death's cousin."

"Love you too, Dad," I croaked. I elbowed my way higher up on the pillows from where I must have slid down in my sleep and scrubbed a hand across my face. My arms still trembled and I let them flop back down on the bed, since it just took too much effort to keep them still. "I don't know," I continued. "I just felt really sick all of a sudden, and then I fell out of my desk and fainted. I'm still really weak," I said, raising a trembling hand in example, "but I feel okay now. Except for having the strength of a soggy noodle." There was no use in explaining to them what had really happened, and there were several reasons why I didn't. For one, telling them that I'd been attacked by a smoke monster would only make them think I'd lost it, or at best that I'd hit my head too hard on the way out of my desk. Telling them the truth, that I'd been attacked by an evil overlord of a computer virus, would go against everything that Jeremie had asked me to do, and would also contribute to my family's belief that I had gone off my rocker. Jeremie and Company, I assumed, were currently in the process of kicking some computer butt, and in a little while I'd be back in Psychology anyways thanks to Jeremie's meddling with the time-space continuum, so there was no point in telling my family anything they didn't need to know about.

Like X.A.N.A.

"Mr. Nichols thinks you had a seizure," Jake said.

"I didn't." I smiled at them, lying through my teeth and trying to be reassuring at the same time, because I wasn't so sure I _hadn't_ had a seizure. "Remember that time that Lydia passed out after running too much?" She had been running laps around our house the year before while training for a marathon and generally just trying to maintain her stick-thin ballerina body. After twenty-five laps accompanied with a lack of breakfast, Lydia had stumbled inside to get some water and collapsed out of her chair at the kitchen table. She definitely fainted, but while she was out she lay on the floor and continued to run. It had scared the living daylights out of Eric, who thought she was having a seizure and had almost called emergency services. "I think that's what happened to me, or something like it," I added. "I think it's pretty normal for people to dream they're somewhere else when they faint."

"What did you dream?" Dad asked.

"I was with Mom." That ought to put an end to any unwanted questions, I thought. Even though she'd been gone for two and a half years, Mom was still a little bit of a sore subject around the house. We had no problem going to visit her at the cemetery, but it was harder to talk about her like she was still alive because we all conjured up memories of her last days when she weighed eighty pounds and was bald as an egg. Her face had looked so strange, like the skin of her cheeks was stretched too thin but also hung in wrinkles and folds over her cheekbones. She didn't have any eyelashes or eyebrows and joked that she enjoyed not having to shave her legs or wash her hair, but I think she knew when her cancer came back the last time that her hair would never have a chance to grow back. Before the cancer came it had been long and the sort of red that only exists in fires. Every time I caught a glance of myself in a mirror I saw my mom; all the boys except Connor had my Dad's coloring and were generally tanned and dark-haired, while my mom, Connor and I all had fiery red hair and were on the pale side of tan. Connor was sort of a weird hybrid of my parents, with my mom's coloring but an amped-up version of my dad's curls. Connor kept his hair cropped close to his head but occasionally it grew into the sort of afro one only expected to see on circus clowns.

My family only stayed a few more minutes—apparently they'd been in the infirmary for almost a half hour, having walked in right after I fell asleep.

"You guys need to get back to class," My dad said, above the riotous groans of my brothers. "Plus my free period is almost over. Let's go." He shooed Mason and Jake out of the door, then turned back to look at me. "Will you be okay?"

"I'm fine, Dad." I smiled at him. "Really. I'm just peachy. Just come by and get me when you leave, 'cause I don't think I can stand up right now."

ZXCVBNM

If Yumi Ishiyama were in possession of anything, it was impeccable timing. As my family walked out of the infirmary she slithered in like a black shadow and sat down on the edge of my bed, making the springs of my mattress groan in protest of the added weight of another person. "Are you okay?" She hissed as she looked around the room, trying to avoid the scrutiny of Nurse Dorothy.

"I'm fine. What are you doing here? Shouldn't you be kicking some computer butt?" I whispered. I could play the secrecy game too, although a tall Japanese girl sitting on my bed was anything but inconspicuous.

She shook her head. "I got devirtualized." She got _what?_ "And the others need help, so I came to find you."

I decided not to ask what "devirtualized" meant, as it sounded only marginally less painful than possession, X.A.N.A. style. "I'd love to help you, but I have the strength of a wet noodle. I don't think I can get very far." I held up a shaking hand in example; like my dad and my brothers, she frowned.

"I'm sure we can figure something out once you get out of the infirmary. But they need you, _now_."

"Hm." I sat up and took the weight off of the pillows on the headboard which had been supporting most of my body weight, then turned and dangled my feet off the edge of the mattress, trying to judge how much weigh they would hold and whether or not I could trust them to get me into the hall. My stomach muscles quivered under the newfound weight of the rest of my body.

"STOP!" Nurse Dorothy shrieked, skidding to a halt in front of my bed and fixing me with a stare that would have withered plants. "Where do you think you're going?"

If there was one thing that really bothered me, it was an adult who was both pompous and spoke to me like I was a child. I might have only been fifteen and I'd be the first one to admit that I still had a lot of growing up to do, but I wasn't dumb. Now was not the time to get my revenge on condescending adults, but I decided that the next time I had a choice between saving Nurse Dorothy from whatever X.A.N.A. attack she had encountered and letting her encounter the consequences for herself, she was going down. With a capital D.

"Well, I'd like to go back to class." I gave her a sickly-sweet smile, doing my best to look innocent and like I wouldn't like to murder her where she stood. "I've got Physics soon, and I really don't need to miss any more lectures than I have to."

Nurse Dorothy looked skeptical. "Can you hold a pencil?"

"I'm sure I can manage as long as I can rest my arm on a desk. It shakes if I have to hold it up, but as long as I don't have to support its weight I think I'll be all right." I was lying through my teeth. There was no way my hands were strong enough to hold onto a pencil, but as long as I was convincing it didn't really matter.

"Here." Nurse Dorothy yanked a table close enough to write on and shoved a pen and my medical charts into my hands. "Write your name on the folder. Prove it, and you can go."

I scrunched my eyebrows in concentration and bit my tongue between my teeth, wiling my hands not to shake. I was so concentrated, in fact, that I didn't even see Yumi flying out of the corner of the infirmary with a bedpan, and it was only at the loud KLANG that I looked up to see Nurse Dorothy collapse on the floor.

ZXCVBNM

"I didn't have time to wait," she explained as she wheeled me across the soccer fields in a wheelchair we had commandeered. In the end we had stuffed Nurse Dorothy into a supply cabinet in the infirmary, where we hoped she wouldn't be missed by anyone but the kid with the stomach bug. Who was, fortunately, heavily sedated. We didn't think he would be waking up anytime soon.

"Why a bedpan?" I'd asked as we closed the door.

She shrugged. "There was nothing else around. It was only aluminum. I think she'll be all right."

"She might be. We'll probably be expelled." I frowned, trying to figure out how I was going to tell my dad I'd been expelled from Kadic.

Yumi just shrugged and shook her head. "I doubt we'll be expelled. We'll return to the past as soon as X.A.N.A. is defeated. None of this will have ever happened." We were at the drain cover now; by unspoken mutual consent I pitched myself head first out of the wheelchair and landed on my hands and knees.

"Do you think you can stand up?" She asked, looking from the wheelchair to the drain cover and back again with a look of growing skepticism. "I don't think it's going to fit."

"Well, it's worth a try." I clawed my way up a tree and into standing position, where I stood on wobbly knees—but stood, nonetheless. Yumi gave me a brief nod of satisfaction and motioned for me to go down the drain first.

I took a deep breath and made the plunge.

ZXCVBNM

By the looks of things we had arrived at the factory just in time, no doubt due to Yumi's impeccable timing skills. Jeremie waved vaguely in our direction as Yumi hopped out of the elevator. I descended another floor and met Odd as he came out of one of the scanners, looking bedraggled but no worse for the considerable wear he had encountered on Lyoko.

I'd managed pretty well on the way to the factory, stumbling a couple times but emerging unscathed. Even though I still stood on shaky legs, I stood. And walked. The more I moved around, the more strength my X.A.N.A. fried muscles regained.

Going to Lyoko was always a blur. I always meant to try and see what was going on around me as I was transported between worlds, but the only thing I ever wound up remembering was a brief period of total blackness—so dark I couldn't see my hand in front of my face blackness—before I emerged twenty feet up in the air and unable to breathe. Not being able to breathe always bothered me, even after I'd been fighting on Lyoko for several years. It was just second nature to pant when I was running, but even that act just produced a sound and not the actual act of breathing.

I felt so much better once I was on Lyoko than I had while I was on Earth, at least for about ten seconds. I was pleased to see that my legs no longer wobbled, and I had the coordination and muscle tone to ball my hands into fists at the thought of pummeling X.A.N.A. for what he'd put me through that morning. I turned around to follow Jeremie's directions, in the process discovering that while on Lyoko I instinctively knew which direction was North, and saw several very large cubes on very short legs staring at me. Or at least I think they were staring at me, because since they had no faces I really couldn't be sure which direction they were facing.

They started shooting laser beams at me. Instinct told me they were bad news, so I shrieked and ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

"You have a knife in your belt," Jeremie said, his voice floating down from the dark blue sky. I groped at my hip and discovered that, yes indeed, I did have a knife in my belt. I was significantly sure that if I actually _threw_ it at anything I would miss, but as I was being pursued by a giant laser-shooting Rubik's Cube I decided it was worth it. So, I tossed the knife and stabbed one of the cubes in the eye, where the knife stayed buried to the hilt. The cube twitched, fell over, and exploded… along with my dagger.

"Well, shoot. Now what?" I asked Jeremie. "My knife just exploded."

"It regenerates itself," he said. "It should already be back in your belt."

"We-ell! Lookie there! So it is!" I snatched it out of my belt and turned to face the rest of the cubes, who hadn't moved from where their fallen comrade lay. "Who's next, you giant quadrangles?" I doubted they could speak to volunteer themselves (or each other), so I chucked my knife at the next one and watched it explode, cackling in glee at having hit something twice in a row. I made short work of the third cube, but the fourth one shot me before I could kill it.

My arm felt like it was on fire. It sort of disappeared briefly, and I could see what looked like a wire structure in the shape of my arm and the ground underneath that before my arm regenerated itself and the pain disappeared. I glared at the cube and was about to fling my knife at it again before Ulrich appeared, stabbed the cube in the eye with his Katana, and motioned for me to follow him.

"You stole my thunder!" I said accusingly.

ZXCVBNM

Being devirtualized _hurt_. That was what I realized as the scanner door opened and I stumbled out, Ulrich close behind me. Perhaps I hadn't realized it the last time I'd been devirtualized, or perhaps I was only noticing it now that I'd been electrocuted and devirtualized in the same day. Either way, I once again felt like a giant blob of jello that had been smacked with a canoe paddle. I'd stubbornly clung to my life points until Aelita had entered the tower, at which point the horde of cubes that Ulrich and I had been stabbing shot me in the chest. My 3D character shattered into thousands of digitized cards, at which point everything went black.

I wasn't out of the scanner for long before everything went white, this time, and suddenly I found myself sitting in Psychology again, next to Odd and Jeremie. It took a second for me to wrap my mind around the fact that I was several hours in the past, and a few seconds more for me to get my bearings about our progress in the class. Mr. Nichols was still lecturing about Freud, so I figured we had arrived at our current location shortly before the Indigestion Incident. I picked up my pencil and started taking notes, once again burying myself in Freud and his wingnut theories.

A tiny piece of paper landed on my desk, and by reflex I slapped my hand over it before Mr. Nichols could snatch it from me. Emilie and I had been the note-passing queens, and even though we hadn't spoken in almost three months and hadn't passed notes in longer than that, I still had what it took. Who could this have come from, though? Emilie wasn't even in Psychology with me—Dad had made sure of that, after we fought this summer.

I unfurled the paper as inconspicuously as I could and read what was written:

_I need to talk to you after class. –Jeremie_

Passing notes seemed like a pretty un-Jeremie-like behavior. I palmed the note and dropped it in my lap when Mr. Nichols wasn't looking, and prayed for the end of class to come quickly.

ZXCVBNM

"Your arrow was green," Jeremie said bluntly as soon as we were safely swallowed in a sea of chattering students. "I don't know why. It doesn't make any sense to me."

"Why would it go from yellow to green?" Odd raised his eyebrows. "That makes no sense, Einstein. Are you sure you saw it right?"

"Yes." Jeremie bent over and pulled a sheet of paper from his backpack—a screenshot, I realized, of our Lyokian forms and their various multicolored arrows. Mine was, as promised, green.

"Well." I couldn't think of anything to say, and said so. "It just doesn't make any sense. I'm with Odd. I don't understand why, or how, it could have gone from yellow to green. So, what, I was part of Lyoko but now I'm not anymore?"

"Do you think this is something that X.A.N.A. did?" Odd asked.

"Maybe? I need time to think." Jeremie pinched the bridge of his nose, then pulled his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt.

"What if…" I frowned. "What if this has something to do with what happened to me when I blacked out on Lyoko? Did you look at my arrow right after I blacked out?"

"I didn't, sorry." Jeremie said apologetically. "I was more concerned with whether or not you were alive."

"It's really okay. I'd rather be alive than yellow or green." I smiled at him as the warning bell rang. "I need to go or I'm going to be late. Should I meet you for lunch again tomorrow?"

"You have a standing invitation at our table," Odd said, bowing ridiculously low and wiggling his eyebrows at me. "I shall see you tomorrow, my peach queen. Just don't bring any food in its own snot."

I rolled my eyes at him and headed toward my locker.

ZXCVBNM

I stalked into the kitchen right behind my brothers as soon as we got home, and walked down the hall only to change into some sweatpants and toss my backpack on the bed. Then I headed back to the kitchen and got the big stand mixer that had belonged to my mother's mother off the top shelf of the bookcases that served as our pantry. I pulled down all the ingredients necessary for chocolate chip cookies, and decided to take my frustration on X.A.N.A. and whatever the jank he was doing to me out on the afternoon's baking.

As I was the only girl, and the only one with any skill in wielding a spatula or a frying pan, I did a lot of the cooking around the house. Dad did his fair share, as did Connor, but if there was anything special to be made (like bread or cookies) it was my domain.

My dad walked into the kitchen, admitting a sharp blast of wind from the outside door as he wrestled to close it. My dad never went anywhere with empty hands; he always wore dress pants and a white shirt to school and took a dress coat, which stayed perpetually folded over one arm and which he almost never wore. He kept a traveling coffee mug clenched in one fist and his prehistoric briefcase in the other, and at the moment was trying to close the door by twisting the doorknob with his foot.

"Well then," Dad said, plopping his briefcase and coffee mug down on the kitchen table and hanging his coat over the back of a chair. "How was your day?"

"Oh, you know," I said vaguely. I wondered for a second why he wasn't worried about my near-escape from death earlier that morning, but realized that to my dad that had never happened. How did Jeremie and Company keep what had happened in real life separate from what had happened during a X.A.N.A. attack? I had a bad feeling that I was going to inadvertently reveal X.A.N.A.'s existence, due to my own inability to remember what had and hadn't happened.

We sat in companionable silence for a while as I sifted flour and measured vanilla extract. Dad sipped a fresh cup of coffee (four creams, no sugar) and stared out the kitchen window at the grape vines in the backyard, going brown with the advent of fall.

I sighed suddenly, and before I turned the mixer on I turned to my dad. "Am I adopted?" I asked suddenly. I hadn't realized it was bothering me until lunch, when Jeremie had said that for my arrow to be yellow I had to be part of Lyoko. I couldn't think of any way for me to be a part of Lyoko short of my inclusion in the program by whoever had created it.

"Are you what?" My dad yelped, setting the coffee cup down on the table harder than was necessary. "No. You are not adopted. Here," he said, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket and flipping it open to the pictures of his children. He had baby pictures of all of us in his wallet, in the order of our births. Dan's picture, taken in the late eighties, was grainy and strangely colored, while mine, taken eight years later, was sharper in resolution.

"Look at this," he said, handing me an old black and white picture of someone I didn't recognize. Or no, I did recognize her.

It was my mom.

She wasn't any older than six or seven in that photo, sitting on a swing in the backyard of her childhood home in Alabama and wearing clothes that my grandmother had made her. There was an old automobile in the background of the photo, a black and white cat curled up in the sun on its hood. Mom was stretched almost horizontal, her pixie-cut red hair blowing in the wind. She was smiling with such an expression of joy that my heart clenched in sudden longing. It had been too long since I'd seen her.

Dad set another picture on the counter, this one of me.

"If that doesn't answer your question, I don't know what will," he said, his voice a little lower than usual.

It could have been the same picture, except for mine was in color and Mom's wasn't. We had the same hair; it was like someone had used photoshop and put her hair on my head. And we both had the same expression, one of unflagging joy as we giggled at whoever was taking our pictures, stretched horizontal in the swing and flying through the air like red-headed missiles.

"You are my child," Dad said, wrapping me in a hug. "I promise. You are mine."

To be continued… with 1000% more uncertainty!

ZXCVBNM

So. I'm sorry that it took me three years to post again, and I really have no excuse except for being really lazy. It happens. I've been sleeping late and going to bed late and reading way too many books and knitting socks and baking bread and bagels like nobody's business, and I finally just this afternoon got around to finishing this chapter. It's long again, nine pages and change, but I think that's just the way this story is going to be—long, and wordy. The last time I wrote this my chapters only ended up being seven pages max, but I feel like their extra length now has to do with the fact that I'm older and more experienced as a writer.

Anyways. I'm not going to gab your ears off (or I guess it would be eyes, since you're reading and not listening). I hope you enjoyed this chapter!

I need to thank the reviewers for the last two chapters, since I lamentably forgot to do that last time.

So: Thanks to

Sardonyxia

Fraz Hopper

Lavender Moonlight In the Snow

Krystal

And HayleyTylers

Thank you guys so much for reviewing! My ego gets bigger every time someone pushes the little review button. So Review, because you totes know you want to.

Love it? Hate it? Lemme know.


	6. In Which I Learn A Secret

A/N: Again, I apologize for taking so lamentably long to post this chapter. But I have a good excuse this time—this thing called SCHOOL. It is taking up more of my life than I would like to sacrifice. I'm busy every day from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep, and when I have a spare moment I usually use it to do homework. I'm making faces over here like you can see me. Anyways, so here's the next chapter. Already some things have happened which I didn't expect, but I can't tell you about them because that will ruin the surprise. I hope you enjoy it! (And review. You totally know you want to review).

ZXCVBNM

As soon as we met, Emilie and I hit it off. We were like two peas in a pod, peas and carrots, and peanut butter and jelly. We never went anywhere without each other. When one of us broke into uncharted territory (like holding hands with a boy or, _gasp_, actually KISSING one), the other was sure to follow.

Emilie was always the bolder one of our duo, and she was usually the first one to do something new. She got her first kiss when we were in the seventh grade, from Tomas de la Croix, on a school field trip to the fair. By a stroke of luck Emilie found herself sitting next to Tomas de la Croix on the bus, and instantly declared herself madly and passionately in love with him. By the time we disembarked in Paris, only an hour away from Kadic, Emilie had stolen not one but THREE kisses from Tomas. Quite the little fireball, my Emilie was.

I would never have told Emilie once she had kissed him, but Tomas had been the object of my affections since I had laid eyes on him during lunch my first day as a sixth-grader. Emilie, daring as she was, got to him first, so I kept my paws to myself. I couldn't stand to be left in the dust, though, and immediately began a prowl around the school for suitable boys to smooch. Problem was, none of them compared to Tomas.

Some were too tall, and I would have to stand on my very tippy toes to plant a big wet one on them. Some were too short, and they would have to stand on _their_ very tippy toes if they wanted to kiss me. Some were too different from me. Some were friends with my brothers, and therefore ruled out by default. Tomas was just a little bit taller than me and had broad shoulders (even by guy standards), and he wasn't friends with any of my brothers. He was perfect.

Emilie and Tomas broke up a few weeks after the fair, and she moped after him for a few days and then went off chasing someone else. I was a little bit disheartened, since the number one rule of being best friends is _thou shalt not date thy best friend's ex. _Tomas was, therefore, strictly off limits with a capital O. I remember that after she and Tomas broke up, Emilie and I both covertly admired Ulrich from a distance, but never had the guts to actually approach him. We revered him as something like a god and kept our distance, lest a higher being smite us where we stood.

I found myself with Tomas one day after school, when he was ambling freely over the grounds and I was waiting at the front gate for the rest of my family to catch up to me so we could go home, since as a seventh grader I was absolutely _not _riding the subway by myself. Tomas and I made polite conversation as we waited for my family, just the usual things two strangers ask each other. I hadn't expected him to even _talk_ to me, and I certainly hadn't expected him to kiss me!

But kiss me he did, just a quick peck on the lips before he ambled into the woods, giving me a sly smile over his shoulder. My seventh-grade cheeks burst into flame and I stood at the front gate of the school, face radiating heat and hand over my lips, until my father found me I don't even know how much later.

When Emilie found out she was _furious_. I remembered thinking that even in the seventh grade, my life was a soap opera, and I also remember thinking that perhaps Emilie was overreacting just the tiniest bit. Emilie and I made up, of course, but only after I practically begged for forgiveness on my hands and knees. Tomas never spoke to me again after that day, which I think is what healed the blight on my friendship with Emilie. If he had continued to see me I'm not sure that Emilie would have forgiven me.

But that wasn't the last fight we had.

ZXCVBNM

I thought about sitting with Mason and Jake at lunch the next day, but Jake was still a little cheesed at me for mentioning Emilie the day before and Mason was canoodling with Caroline Savorani, a girl who was a year older than me and on the track team with him. Caroline was sweet and I was happy for my brother, but given the choice between intriguing Italian and German boys and grumpy, lovesick brothers, I took the foreign boys. Can you blame me?

"Ah, come to join us, have you?" Odd asked, doing that ridiculous bow again. "I hope you didn't bring any peaches."

I pulled a can of peaches out of my lunch bag with a malicious grin—I'd put in a special request for them the night before, and Connor had been quite happy to oblige, as he bought canned peaches in bulk from the grocery store since the eight of us ate them so often—and popped open the lid, deliberately wafting the syrupy-sweet smell towards Odd as I did so. He turned green and frowned at me as I stabbed a peach with my fork and slurped it up, then swallowed and gave him a big grin.

"That might be the most disgusting thing I've ever seen," he commented. "How can you eat stuff like that?"

I shrugged nonchalantly. "I love peaches. What can I say?"

He made a little noise of frustration in the back of his throat. "I love peaches as much as the next person, but not when they're floating in a can of boogers!"

I think he thought that by referring to my lunch in the most graphic manner possible I would get grossed out and stop eating my peaches. He was sorely mistaken. "Nope, sorry." I raised my eyebrows at him and slurped up another peach. "I grew up eating these peaches, and nothing's ever happened to me."

He rolled his eyes. "Just wait. One day, you will regret eating booger food."

"You're one to talk; you'll eat anything that isn't nailed to the floor!" I said indignantly. "You can't lecture me about what to eat!"

"I'll eat anything except for food in its own snot," he corrected, holding up a finger and waving it in my face; I went cross-eyed trying to focus on it, and he smirked, then continued. "Like booger peaches. And pudding. And I really don't like Jell-O or oatmeal. But other than that, anything goes."

"Mm." I slurped down another peach while I tried to think of some witty retort, but I was saved from my inferior brain powers by Yumi, who leaned down the table and got my attention.

"You need to tell Jeremie what happened yesterday," she said, obviously referencing my brush with X.A.N.A., smoke style.

"You're right, I do," I said. In all the chaos of the day before I hadn't had a chance to tell Jeremie—or any of the others—what had happened. Yumi knew because she'd rescued me from the infirmary, but the boys had all been on Lyoko and hadn't been around to be told what had happened.

"I heard you had a seizure?" Odd asked. I shook my head and swallowed the last peach in the can, then related the tale of my very strange day in between bites of a turkey and bacon sandwich. Healthy it was not, but our family patriarch came from a state where whole pigs were routinely eaten for breakfast. I may have lived in France for most of my life, but that didn't mean that a healthy portion of me wasn't still Alabamian and therefore very susceptible to the lure of deep fried bacon.

"Weird." Ulrich was eating today, I noticed. "Not that X.A.N.A. attacked you," he added, at my look of confusion, "but that he couldn't possess you."

"But he possessed your brother. Why should he be able to control one person and not another?" Yumi asked.

"I don't think it's so weird," Jeremie said, and four sets of eyes swiveled to focus on him. "I have a theory," he continued. "I think that X.A.N.A. was able to control your brother because he hadn't been to Lyoko, but because you had you were instinctively able to resist him. I think it will be the same for all of you," he said, looking around the other inhabitants of the lunch table, "but maybe not for me, because I've never been."

"You've never been to Lyoko?" I asked in surprise. That was a shocker. I hadn't really thought about Lyoko's origins, but I think I had halfway assumed that Jeremie had created it. Although, now that I was really thinking about it, I vaguely remembered someone telling me that Jeremie had found Lyoko, and Aelita, on accident.

As if he had read my mind, Jeremie shook his head. "I found the supercomputer when I was looking for spare parts for a robot, and then Ulrich and Odd were transported to Lyoko while I controlled things earthside. Once Yumi joined the team there was really no reason for me to go." He shrugged. "I suppose if X.A.N.A. is going to make a habit out of possessing people then I need to go to Lyoko to develop a tolerance."

"So you think he couldn't control me because I've been to Lyoko, not because some part of me is already jankity when it comes to X.A.N.A.?" I asked.

"I don't think this has anything to do with you remembering X.A.N.A. attacks, no." Jeremie took a bite of his own lunch, cafeteria-style meatloaf and a mountain of mashed potatoes which Odd was eyeing with something akin to lust. "I really do think it's because you've all been to Lyoko. I guess we won't know for sure until someone else is attacked, but as a theory I think it stands on its own."

"Speaking of jankitiness," I said around a mouthful of chips, "Do you have any more insights about X.A.N.A.? Or why my arrow keeps changing colors?"

Jeremie shook his head. "I can't think of another angle to attack this problem from, but I think part of the problem is that I don't feel like I have enough information. I don't know how to gather more information, though, because I've run all the tests I can think of to run. I suppose that as we know more about Lyoko the answer might reveal itself to us, but I'm afraid that for now we'll have to be content with the answer of no answer."

ZXCVBNM

I headed outside after lunch to watch Mason obliterate Ulrich at soccer, intent on using the free time to decipher my Italian homework (which was, unfortunately, written in Italian). I had no hope of understanding it without Eric's help, and possibly the help of a professional translator, but I figured that I could at least sit down and stare it into submission so that it would cooperate when I did have some help.

I very quickly gave up, and let my mind wander. I wasn't quite sure what my relationship was to Jeremie and Company. On the one hand, I thought that we might maybe be friends; how many people can you name who would knock out the school nurse with an aluminum bedpan for you? And I thought that someone who wasn't my friend wouldn't tease me about eating canned boogers. But on the other hand, we were only acquainted because of my jankity X.A.N.A. remembering skills, and I was sure that a fairly healthy portion of Jeremie wanted to keep an eye on me just to make sure that I didn't reveal his secret to the whole school. Of course I would never tell anyone, but Jeremie had no way of knowing that.

I realized as I sat there that a large part of me _wanted_ to be friends with them. Craved it, even. I knew I sounded like a whiny three-year-old, but I was lonely. What had happened between Emilie and I had been earth-shaking, and I had left that friendship glad that it was over. When Emilie and I had been best friends I hadn't really hung out with anyone else; I spent most of the afternoons in her dorm or on campus doing homework, but we were always together. It had almost been like a relationship, I thought, and akin to some of the tougher breakups I'd seen the older boys go through. I had grieved and cried and moped and been angry, then resigned myself to loneliness for the rest of my life. Now that there was an interesting prospect on the horizon in the form of four Lyokian warriors, life was getting fun again.

The literature nerd in me wanted to see the symbolism in everything so I sat on the wall by the soccer field, Italian homework momentarily forgotten, while I tried to think of more ways to compare my "breakup" with Emilie to my discovery of an entirely new prospective friend group. I was doing so when Odd plunked down on the wall next to me, shoving my Italian homework out of the way.

"What's up?" He asked me, crossing his ankles and taking a sip of a soda he had somehow acquired in the five minutes since we'd left the lunch table.

"Nothing," I answered truthfully, and then changed my mind. "You're Italian, right?"

He raised his eyebrows but nodded, being too busy sucking orange Fanta through a straw to actually speak to me. I reached across him and grabbed my Italian homework from where he had shoved it away, then plopped it down on his lap, eliciting a squeak of protest. "Help," I said simply.

He grinned evilly and set his Fanta down next to him, then cracked his knuckles with more zeal than was really necessary and picked up my workbook. "What have we got here?" He asked in Italian, and I only understood what he said because I asked him to repeat it in French.

I had to admit that for a group of people who all spoke French, we were quite the multilinguistic group of almost-friends. I spoke English and French fluently, as did most of the other members of the group, but I knew that Yumi usually spoke Japanese at home, and that Ulrich was fluent in German. Not only was he _from_ Germany and therefore knew the language by default, I knew he knew it because I'd heard him swearing at the giant cubes on Lyoko in German. He had quite the vocabulary. I supposed he would, being from Germany.

As for Odd, I knew he was fluent in Italian and French, and I suspected that he had quite the English vocabulary, but I'd never heard him actually speak any English so I couldn't be sure.

"Do you speak any English?" I asked him in English as he stared at my Italian homework with his brows furrowed.

He shrugged and answered in English. "Little. And very bad."

"Badly," I corrected, and switched back to French. "Your English skills are still better than my Italian skills, though."

Odd shrugged. "My dad was in the military, so until I came to Kadic I learned English at the international schools I went to. But my French wasn't so good, so once I got here I took French instead of English."

"Well, you're fluent now," I said. "And you don't even have an accent!"

"I did. When I was first learning people could hardly understand me." He shrugged again. "What about you? Speak any other languages?"

"We speak English at home, most of the time, because the older boys only spoke English when we moved." As I had been three years old when we moved I'd learned English and French at an equal rate, and spoke both languages without an accent. I said so to Odd, who raised his eyebrows at me. "My mom was American, so she taught me English. She made me practice the words until I could say them without an accent. I got the French accent-free from school. And we're speaking in French now, so I obviously know that one. As for Italian…" I poked my workbook with the eraser end of my pencil and sighed. "It's beautiful. I don't want to ever speak anything else."

"And yet here you are, speaking French," he said, the corners of his mouth turning up into a smile.

"I didn't say I was good at it, I just said I loved it," I defended.

"What are you doing in France, anyways?" He asked me. "And how did your dad wind up with five American kids? He's a French citizen if I've ever seen one."

"Truth." I smiled, and filled him in on my family's history, starting from how my parents met when Mom was in France on a study abroad semester. "When Mom went into remission we decided to stay, and then when her cancer came back the second time we were glad we hadn't gone back to America." I finished.

"Is your mom doing better now?" He asked, still concentrating on my Italian homework. I was glad, because then he couldn't see my face.

"She actually passed away a little over two years ago," I said, and his head snapped up like someone had tied a string to it and yanked. It was a little bit comical, how people almost always had the same reaction. Almost everyone who found out that my mom had died would stare at me, eyes wide in dismay, as they tried to decide whether they had committed some terrible faux pas, or if I was going to suddenly burst into tears like an emotionally unstable wreck. When the boys told someone that Mom had died, that person would just clear their throat gruffly and quickly change the subject, but around me their reactions always verged on horror.

"I'm so sorry," he said, and I believed him. I smiled but didn't say anything, and after a few seconds he turned back to the Italian workbook and cleared his throat. "Okay, so what you're doing is conjugating verbs."

ZXCVBNM

Jeremie found us a few minutes later, sipping orange Fanta through a straw himself. I wondered whether the rest of the Lyokians had orange Fanta or if I was the only one who had missed that memo. Jeremie sat down next to us and gave me a smile, then pulled his laptop out of his backpack and started working on something with such intense concentration that I was scared to ask him what he was doing for fear that he might shriek like a little girl and drop his laptop off the wall. But ask him I did, when he came up for air several minutes later.

"Hm?" He asked, looking around like he was getting his bearings. "Oh. It's…" he sighed, then pulled his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose again. Then he cleared his throat and looked at me. "It's a virtualization program for Aelita."

"A who for what?" I raised my eyebrows at him. "I thought she was already virtualized."

Jeremie and Odd shook their heads and said "No," in unison. "She's virtualized," Jeremie continued. "What I'm trying to do is bring her _here_."

"What… how… Is that even _possible?"_ I asked.

"It has to be; look at yourself. You've been virtualized and devirtualized twice, and you're still alive."Jeremie said, quite matter-of-factly. I would have called him out for being snarky but I was more interested in his program for Aelita.

"Well then why can't you use the same program on Aelita?" I asked, and immediately regretted asking because I was sure that Jeremie had already thought of that approach. I always felt that way when I brought up new ideas around Jeremie, especially ones that had to do with computers; if Ulrich was a soccer god, Jeremie's mother was Queen Mother Board. He knew _everything_.

Jeremie shook his head. "She's not like you or me. I don't think she's even human, really. She has no memories of who she was or where she came from before I turned the supercomputer back on, which leads me to believe that she is an AI—an Artificial Intelligence—placed on Lyoko by its creator. Her codes don't include a program for devirtualization because she was never virtualized in the first place. She was, and always has been, a part of Lyoko."

I nodded, and then got a very bright idea and said so. "Don't you think _I_ was a part of Lyoko? At least for a little while?" I asked.

Jeremie nodded. "But I don't see what that has to do with…Oh." His eyebrows went up so far I thought they were going to rocket off his face. "That's a good idea! Why didn't I think of that?" He asked, slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead.

"Think of what?" Now Odd was out of the loop, and by the look on his face he didn't appreciate it one bit.

"Parker was a part of Lyoko. At least for a little while," Jeremie said. "And Aelita still _is _a part of Lyoko. I'm wondering if the code for Aelita's devirtualization could be found somewhere in Parker's codes?"

"Well, that's a good idea!" Odd said, like it was the most brilliant thing he'd heard all day (but that's probably because it was).

I was used to this little routine by now. Ideas equaled tests, which equaled my Lyokian form. "You'd need me to be virtualized, right?" I asked.

Jeremie nodded again. "There's no guarantee that this will work, either, because you aren't a part of Lyoko _now_. But maybe by doing this last test, we'll figure this all out."

"But, it's worth a shot. Especially to save Aelita. Right?" I nudged Jeremie in the side with my elbow and waggled my eyebrows at him suggestively. There was no way he didn't think I hadn't heard the way he talked to Aelita—I think he even called her "Princess" once. How he felt about her was obvious. How she felt about him was less obvious.

He blushed an impressive shade of scarlet and coughed, then turned his face away from me under the guise of cleaning his glasses with the hem of his shirt. "Well."

ZXCVBNM

Jeremie went back to his program after that, while Odd and I went back to work on my Italian homework. When the bell rang we staggered off to Psychology class with Italian verbs bouncing around on the inside of our skulls. As a side effect of Odd's quick Italian lesson I found myself taking every verb that Mr. Nichols uttered and translating it into Italian, and when he called on me I almost answered in Italian. It was the feeling of my mouth forming an unfamiliar word which snapped me out of my Italian daze, and I quickly answered in French, then slid down in my desk.

We were going over Freud again, and I did not want to listen to any more lectures on the Oedipus Complex. So, I tore a sheet of paper out of my notebook and started scribbling on it in Italian. It was really Fretalian, actually, since a good half of what I was writing was in French because I didn't know the Italian word. It started out as a series of scribbles, just some thoughts that were on my mind, but quickly became a note to Odd.

_What would you do if I showed up at lunch every day with a can of peaches? My brother buys them in bulk from the grocery store because we eat so many of them. It's a possibility. _

_Tell me about your family, now that you know all about mine. I think I remember you saying that you have six sisters? _

His note-interception skills were almost as good as mine, I decided, as he stomped on the note I slid smoothly under Jeremie's desk with my foot. He bent down to pick it up when Mr. Nichols had his back turned to write on the board, and by the time that our teacher turned back around to face the class Odd had silently unfolded the note, read it, and was happily penning his reply.

_Five, actually. For one, I don't think Adele, Pauline, Elisabeth, Marie, and Louise are as nice to me as your brothers are to you. They take great pleasure in locking me in the most inconvenient of places, like the women's bathroom in the airport in Rome. When I was a baby Adele would dress me in some of her old dresses and pretend I was a girl. But, I'm the youngest so I always got to blame things on them. _

We passed notes back and forth for most of the period, happily ignoring Mr. Nichols and his Oedipus Complexes and Freudian Slips. We would have happily ignored him right up until the bell rang, if he hadn't stomped on one of our notes as I was kicking it under Jeremie's desk. He bent to pick it up, fixing us both with the stink eye, then straightened up to read it out loud.

As we had been talking about X.A.N.A., both Odd and I had the same reaction. We leapt to our feet, scrambling over each other (and Jeremie) in our haste to reclaim the note from Mr. Nichols, who, to his credit, merely looked at us weird as Odd wadded the note up and stuffed it into his pocket. "Was it a love note?" Mr. Nichols asked, as we sat down again.

I couldn't think of anything to say, but Odd looked at me with this sickly-sweet expression of his face, fluttered his eyelashes at me, and then turned back to Mr. Nichols and said, "Yes. Yes it was. A love poem, actually."

"Well." Mr. Nichols cleared his throat and made it obvious that he didn't believe a word that Odd had just said. "Detention. Both of you."

"Jank," we muttered under our breath.

ZXCVBNM

We had detention that afternoon with Mrs. Hertz, who was decidedly less cool than Mr. Nichols. I think Mr. Nichols would have let us go after fifteen or twenty minutes, claiming that we had served our time and were free to roam the streets and get into more shenanigans (I knew because I'd had detention with Mr. Nichols twice, and he'd let me out early both times). Mrs. Hertz, though, was determined to keep us for our full sentence, and even when we tried to look extra-pitiful she only _Hmph_ed and went back to grading papers. Odd and I had to sit there in silence for an hour and a half. Odd used the time to do homework, which was perhaps the only time he would do homework all semester, but I used the time to think.

Jeremie had told me about Aelita. I mean, I already knew about Aelita, but Jeremie had told me that he was trying to bring her to earth. The fact that he trusted me with his secret about X.A.N.A. was huge, but he hadn't had to tell me about Aelita or her virtualization program. So what did it mean that he had?

He obviously wouldn't have told me about it if he hadn't already decided that I could be trusted. And while it was possible to trust someone who was not your friend, I doubted that that was what Jeremie considered his relationship with me to be—a trustworthy comrade, but not a friend.

So if he didn't see me as a trustworthy comrade, that only left friends.

Thinking logically, I decided that if Jeremie accepted me as a friend, the others would as well. Jeremie might have been the youngest of the group, but he was the smartest and he was undoubtedly the leader. The others followed his decisions without question, at least as far as I had observed. For him to have told me about Aelita's virtualization program meant, of course, that I had just added four new friends to my repertoire.

To be continued… with 200% more Taelia (I think).

A/N: I feel like the ending to this chapter is a little sudden, but it's all I could come up with.

As for Parker, I feel like she's a little whiny in this chapter, but I would like to explain why in case I did a terrible job of conveying her emotions in the actual story. She and Emilie had a terrible falling out over the summer, which I've mentioned already so don't go get excited because you think I'm going to give stuff away (I'm not). And since she and Emilie haven't spoken in almost four months, her only companions have been her brothers. The girl is understandably lonely, and despairing of ever having a friend again. And then, she meets Jeremie and Company, and all of a sudden things don't look so bleak anymore. Which is why it's such a big deal to her that Jeremie has accepted her as a friend, instead of as a trustworthy comrade. If this doesn't read in the story, let me know and I'll do my best to make it more clear.

So. Love it? Hate it? Lemme know. Review! (Please?)

EDITED: A reviewer told me that I had spelled Tomas two different ways, so I fixed that. Also, I fixed the names of Odd's sisters, as I couldn't remember two of them when I was writing this and then couldn't find them on google. Their names are Adele, Pauline, Elisabeth, Marie, and Louise, not Katerine and Georgiana. Sorry about that, and thanks to Lavender Moonlight in the Snow for letting me know!


	7. In Which I Learn Something Super Jankity

Even though I was dying to help Jeremie materialize Aelita, it was quite a while before I managed to make it to the factory to run the tests he needed to run. The tests actually required three of us, since I wasn't a competent enough fighter to survive on my own for long enough. Thus the problem—there wasn't a time when three of us were free all at once. Due to a sudden flurry of tests and papers, I hadn't been able to make it to the factory for nearly a week. It was like all of our teachers had gotten together in a conference and decided to stress us beyond the realm of normal human capacity by loading us down with more homework and tests than should have been feasible; I literally had a test in every subject, and that included Gym. The students weren't the only ones feeling the burn, though. My father, confronted with six periods worth of freshmen English papers that had to be graded and returned in a week, kidnapped me one afternoon after school and forced me to sit next to him on the couch, where we sat wielding red pens and correcting bad grammar. We would have never told Headmaster Delmas that I sometimes helped grade my father's students' papers, but I relished the opportunity to show off my superior English skills, even if I had to do it anonymously. I never assigned a number grade, of course, but circled big glaring mistakes and improper spelling and left the flunking to my father.

My own school life was thrown into chaos, due to an impending Algebra II test that I felt completely unprepared for, as well as the first Italian test of the semester. I wouldn't have been able to handle it all if X.A.N.A. hadn't been unusually quiet (or so I was told). I really didn't mind his absence as long as he kept his shenanigans out of my studying, but his prolonged nonappearance made my friends antsy. They all acted like they were walking on broken glass, Ulrich especially, because I was learning that he was the kind of person who just needed to kill something every now and then. Without X.A.N.A. around to beat up, Ulrich was losing it.

We all had reacted in different ways to X.A.N.A.'s absence—Odd had spent several hours the previous afternoon teaching Kiwi to catch a Frisbee and had succeeded, no small feat when you considered that the Frisbee was roughly the size of Kiwi and probably weighed about as much. Yumi and Ulrich had taken to sparring each other in the gym when Jim wasn't paying attention, and I'd been baking like a fiend when I was at home, trying to get rid of my unused energy by creating delectable, carbohydrate-rich, heart attack inducing concoctions that I promptly foisted upon my family. Numerous as we were, the calories got spread around evenly, but I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see one of the boys keel over from a through-the-roof cholesterol score after having one too many cookies. Jeremie, apparently, had dived deeper into his materialization program for Aelita, the results of which we were now discussing.

We were sitting at the lunch table, hastily vacuuming our lunches down in the hopes of escaping early enough to go the factory. It was a Friday, and given that I wouldn't be back on campus for two days, we needed to make a move pronto.

"It didn't work," Jeremie said, in reference to his latest materialization attempt. "I don't know, I'm just getting really frustrated with this program!" He smacked the palm of his hand flat against the table, making our silverware leap off our plates—quite a violent gesture, for someone so soft spoken and level-headed. "Sorry," he said a second later, looking a little abashed.

"I'm so offended," I said sarcastically, reaching into my purse. "Here." I slid a bag of oatmeal raisin cookies down the table at him. "Cookies make everything better," I said, in answer to his raised eyebrows. He took a bite of one—tentatively, I noticed, and I figured he must have thought I wasn't a very good cook. "See? Don't you feel better?"

Odd laughed around a mouthful of Brussels sprouts. "No cookies for me?"

I gave him the stink eye and said, "Don't talk with your mouth full. You aren't trying to bring your girlfriend out of a computer to an entirely different world. So no. No cookies for you."

Jeremie turned beet red. "She's not my girlfriend!" He said vehemently, spraying bits of cookie on us, as Ulrich smirked at him and said, "Girlfriend? Really?"

"Don't provoke the animals, Ulrich," Odd said, nudging his roommate in the side with his elbow and watching as Jeremie's face faded back to a normal color, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to think of a suitable reply. Evidently he couldn't, because he quite suddenly closed the bag of cookies, stood up, and grabbed his lunch tray. "Let's go."

ZXCVBNM

I still wasn't used to being virtualized. No matter how much I tried to prepare myself beforehand, I just _couldn't_ get used to the feeling of not being able to breathe. I panicked for a few seconds every time I went to Lyoko, until my brain had time to catch up with the rest of my body and remind my lungs that they did not, in fact, have to work at all. Which brought up an interesting thought—did I even _have_ lungs while on Lyoko? I was fairly sure that I had a brain, but beyond that I doubted the existence of any of my internal organs. I had no blood, or at least I didn't bleed when I got shot, so if I had a heart it wasn't necessary to keep me alive. The other stuff, like my liver and kidneys and spleen, was even less likely to exist, because I didn't need _them_ either. At least, I didn't think so.

We met up with Aelita in the forest sector, where she was minding her own business and was thankfully out of harm's way. The others seemed so protective of her that I figured she wasn't like the rest of us—if her life points disappeared, they wouldn't regenerate. She also couldn't be devirtualized with the rest of us, which meant that if her life points were gone, she would be too.

It was a quick hike to a tower from where we dropped out of the sky. I still marveled at the fact that I had the instinctive ability to determine which direction was north, which was something I could barely do in the real world when the sun actually changed positions in the sky. On Lyoko there was no sun, at least not that I knew of. The light just somehow came down from nowhere, illuminating our path but leaving us in the dark as to how it got there (punny, I know. I couldn't help myself).

"Something's not right," Jeremie muttered, his voice floating down from above us. I'd been to Lyoko, what, two or three times at this point, and I still hadn't trained myself to not look up when Jeremie started talking. It was just a reflex. The others didn't even budge from whatever they were doing when Jeremie started talking, and I knew because I'd seen Jeremie and Ulrich carry on a detailed conversation while Ulrich was beating the poop out of some of X.A.N.A.'s monsters.

"What's going on, Einstein?" Odd asked, casually sitting cross-legged on the floor.

"X.A.N.A. is being way too quiet. Something's off," Jeremie answered, and I could almost see him pull his glasses off and pinch the bridge of his nose in frustration, a gesture he was prone to make when things got weird.

I looked around at my fellow Lyokian warriors, all of whom were affecting casual disinterest in X.A.N.A.'s sudden tranquility. Under the surface, though, I knew they were just as weirded out as Jeremie. "Does he usually mount a full-frontal assault as soon as you get here?" I asked, to no one in particular, dropping to the floor and spreading my skirts modestly over my legs before I crossed them. It was such an ingrained habit, the product of being forcibly installed into a skirt for much of my childhood, that I never really thought about what I was doing anymore; it was just second nature to make sure I wasn't flashing anyone when I sat in a skirt. Now that I thought about it, I wondered if I _could_ flash anyone on Lyoko, or if the program had some kind of immodesty detector and would do something to make sure I _didn't_ flash anyone. I also wondered if I was even wearing underwear at all. Now wasn't the best time to take a quick peek down my skirt, but I vowed that the next time I was alone for a few seconds I was going to find out.

Ulrich shrugged. "Most of the time, we get here in the middle of a battle and X.A.N.A. already has monsters waiting for us." He cracked his knuckles gleefully, obviously picturing himself stabbing his katana into some of X.A.N.A.'s minions and obliterating them.

"Sometimes Aelita lets us know he's going to attack before he actually launches the attack," Jeremie continued. "But I almost never send people to Lyoko unless X.A.N.A. is up to something."

I thought it was funny that Jeremie had put the kibosh on us coming to Lyoko earlier than we had because I needed someone to protect me, and now here I was on Lyoko with three protectors and X.A.N.A. hadn't even put up a fight. X.A.N.A. also didn't know what we were up to, but it was still weird that he hadn't even come after us when we'd shown up. We had literally walked to the tower, forgoing the heavy sprinting which was our usual means of travel, and X.A.N.A. hadn't even sent a roach.

I heard some clacking as Jeremie typed something, and then he said, "Okay. I'm ready."

"What do you want me to do?" I asked, although by now I sort of knew the drill. "The screen?"

"Mm-hmm," Jeremie said absently, and I got to my feet—without flashing anyone—and turned to the screen, only slightly apprehensive. It was an acceptable emotion, given what had happened to me the last time I'd touched the Floating Screen of Death. The others, at least Yumi and Odd, were feeling the same apprehension, which I noticed by the way Odd's mouth curled in on itself slightly and Yumi shifted her weight from one leg to the other, a tiny frown on her face.

Still, there was nothing to be done. Either I touched the screen and freed Aelita from Lyoko, or I put my own interests ahead of the group's and saved myself. Option two was unacceptably selfish, so I shrugged, extended my hand, said, "Bottoms up!" and went for it.

ZXCVBNM

"This isn't a god idea!" Aelita hissed for probably the twelfth time.

"Why are you whispering?" Jeremie's fingers clacked across the keyboard as he hacked into Kadic's computer system. The goal of this little foray was to create a student file for Aelita, as well as enroll her in the classes she needed. It was a whole lot more difficult than it sounded, because since Aelita had never been to Earth she had no social security number, no birth certificate, and no proof of life other than the fact that she was walking and talking (which, frankly, is often not enough when confronted with bureaucracy). Our goal was to give her a _history_. Given that we weren't sure that Aelita was really even human, we were making things up for her as we went along. The general result was hilarity, since our judgment was just a little clouded by how deliriously happy we all were that Aelita was actually _here_.

"Aha!" Jeremie gave a yell of triumph as the inner workings of one of the state department websites popped up on his screen. "I'm in."

We wound up giving Aelita a temporary social security card until the papers for her legitimate one went through, so even though we were breaking several very serious laws it wasn't anything permanent. Given that Jeremie could out hack, out compute, and generally outdo any of the computer scientists currently working for the government (as evidenced by his hacking into their encrypted sites without it being much of an inconvenience to him) we were fairly sure that we weren't going to get caught or arrested.

But that was the boring stuff. Aelita's history was more fun to create—we literally sat in a circle and flipped a coin for one of two outcomes in several situations. Like Aelita's birthplace.

"Heads for Russia, tails for Canada." Aelita, strangely, knew both English and Russian (as well as French), although none of us were sure how. Jeremie theorized that because Lyoko was somehow connected to the internet, Aelita was able to gather information from the internet and filter it unconsciously. According to Jeremie, during those years that the supercomputer had been shut off, Aelita had gained knowledge at a steady rate because of this handy little trick. The rest of us were skeptical, but I had to admit that Jeremie knew what he was talking about. Maybe he was right. Either way, it didn't really matter, but if I decided that if I found out the secret to Aelita's lightning fast language learning skills, I was going to do whatever it took to learn Italian the same way.

Jeremie flipped a Euro in the air and it landed tails up. "Canada it is, then," he said. "What about the reason for her hair color? Genetics, or dye?"

"Dye," the rest of us said in unison. "We don't need to flip a coin for that one," Ulrich continued. "Who ever heard of genetically pink hair?"

"True." Jeremie waved Ulrich's snide remark off with a flap of one hand and absentmindedly tossed the Euro in the air with the other.

Until she'd been materialized, none of us had been sure that Aelita's hair was naturally pink. Given that the supercomputer read into your subconscious and programmed your Lyokian form accordingly, it was a possibility for Aelita to have any hair color. Jeremie was a staunch believer that Aelita had never been to Earth before, thus making pink her natural color, but I wasn't so sure. It just didn't make sense to me—how could Aelita be the only inhabitant of a virtual world? Why didn't whoever created the world also create more than just one being for that world?

"What about my family?" Aelita asked. "Should I have parents, or not?"

"I think maybe we'd better just not say much about your parents," Yumi said. "Until we know who and where they are."

ZXCVBNM

"Gross." I made a face at Jeremie's coffee and handed it back. "You should really put some creamer in that."

He shook his head. "If it was supposed to be full of creamer or sugar, it would come that way. But it doesn't," he said, plunking the cup down on the table, "so I am obliged to drink it black."

We were in a coffee shop just down the street from Kadic, having decided to just skip the rest of the day's classes in favor of some post-materialization celebratory drinks of the non-alcoholic variety. Once school was over we realized that we really didn't have anywhere we had to be, so we'd stayed. It was almost seven by then and Odd was in serious danger of missing dinner, but he didn't really look like he cared. As for missing school, we probably weren't going to get in trouble. Most teachers knew there was no point in fighting a case of senioritis (or junioritis or sophomoreitis) when they could just give us a few freebie days instead.

I crossed my eyes at Jeremie, still trying to get the taste of black coffee out of my mouth. "I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree," I said, taking a sip of my own frapuccino. "I almost never drink coffee, and when I do I use more creamer and honey than should be legally allowed."

"Honey?" Odd raised his eyebrows at me like he didn't quite believe I'd just said I put honey in my coffee.

"I put honey on _everything_," I said seriously. "Coffee, toast, ice cream, fries, chicken…"

"You put honey on _chicken_?" It was Odd who spoke, but all five of them were staring at me in disgust. I could tell that at least Jeremie was trying to calculate the go-together-ness of fried chicken and honey, and Aelita maintained a façade of polite indifference since she didn't really know about this whole honey-on-chicken thing, but the others looked at me like I'd suddenly turned into a dog with seventeen heads.

"Chicken and honey were made for each other." I raised my eyebrows at them, then turned to Odd. "Next time we have fried chicken in the caf, you should try it."

"I'll do that," he said. "Right after I eat some of your booger peaches."

"Oh, stuff it." I rolled my eyes at him and settled back into my chair.

Jeremie looked deliriously happy—like Eric had looked when Lydia said she'd marry him. He and Aelita sat, heads together, in mutual contemplation of Jeremie's physics textbook. Yumi and Ulrich, no less giddy with happiness, were similarly engaged in watching a karate demonstration on Ulrich's phone. Odd, having given into his creative whims, sat sketching Jeremie and Aelita on a napkin. I leaned over and nudged him on the leg with my foot under the table.

"Where is she going to stay?" I asked him, looking pointedly down the table at Aelita.

"Hm? Oh." He frowned. "I guess Einstein can finangle her into the dorms, but until then… I dunno. She could stay with Yumi, but…"

Yumi had never explicitly told us that her parents' marriage was in trouble, but then again, she was our best friend. She didn't have to. Of course, it helped that her brother Hiroki's locker was close to mine, and in the mornings when we were both waiting to go to class I could hear him talking to his friends about what had gone on at home the night before. Hiroki, maybe because he was so young, never really seemed concerned by his parents' failing marriage, but I knew it really bothered Yumi.

"Mm." I grunted, dismissing _that_ idea. "I guess she can't stay with you guys?"

"I mean, our room is already pretty crowded," Odd pointed at Ulrich. "And Jeremie… We're dudes, anyways. Jim would have kittens if he found a weird girl in anyone's room, especially Jeremie's. So no. She can't stay with us."

"Well, that leaves me." I scooted my chair back from the table and grabbed my phone from my purse. "Ima go call my dad."

ZXCVBNM

Lydia was the one who answered the house phone, and given the sheer amount of metal clanging sounds going on in the background I knew that the kitchen sink was backed up again, which explained why Dad hadn't answered. I could just envision Dad and Dan, shoulder to shoulder on their backs in the tiny cabinet under the sink, passing a monkey wrench and a roll of duct tape back and forth as they waged war with seventy-year-old plumbing.

"Lyds? I need a favor." I spoke in English because that was what we always spoke at home—even at school, when it was just me and Mason and Jake at the lunch table, we normally spoke English.

"_Oui. Que puis-je faire pour vous?"_

"Oops." Lydia, being almost as French as my father, spoke about enough English to ask directions to the bathroom and say "I love you, goodbye" to Eric before she left our house at night. I knew she recognized my voice, and given that about the only time I called the house was when I needed a ride somewhere, she must have put two and two together and assumed that I needed something.

"Odd's cousin Aelita just moved here from Canada," I said, switching to French. "And she's getting her dorm tomorrow, but for tonight she needs a place to stay. Can you ask my dad if she can stay with us?"

Lydia must have been drinking something because all of a sudden she choked and spluttered, "What's her name?"

"Aelita," I repeated. "I'd never heard anything like it either, but apparently her mother was Russian." That last part was a lie, but it helped explain why Aelita was fluent in Russian without ever having encountered anyone from Russia.

"I'll ask," Lydia said, and there was a soft _thunk_ as she set the phone down on the kitchen table and set to work extricating my father from underneath the sink.

A couple minutes later my dad picked up the phone. "Can't she stay with your friend Yumi?" he asked, not even bothering to say "hello" or exchange pleasantries before getting down to business.

I cringed. "That's… not really an option, Dad."

"Mm." Dad knew not to push it. I didn't talk about Yumi's parents' marital problems, but dad had taught her in English two years earlier and therefore must have known something was up. "It's just for the night?"

"Yep. She's getting her dorm first thing tomorrow morning, but her flight got delayed and she wound up getting here after hours. She was going to just stay with Odd tonight, but he lives with Ulrich, and that would just be weird."

"Ew. That _would _be weird. Well, it's fine with me. Don't touch that!" He barked, probably to Eric, who in the absence of my father had almost assuredly climbed under the sink with Dan and taken to disemboweling the garbage disposal. "I need to go. I'll send Eric and Lydia to pick you up from the front gate," he said darkly, probably giving the aforementioned brother a glare that would have withered plants. "Take as long as you want," he added. "The longer you keep Eric out of my sink, the better chance he has of living until tomorrow."

ZXCVBNM

Once we made it back to the school the boys peaced out to go get dinner and Yumi headed for home. Aelita and I hung around by the main gate, just waiting on Eric and Lydia to decide they wanted to show up and making polite conversation until they did. I really didn't know Aelita that well, so what little we did speak to each other was strained by awkwardness. Beyond saving her life on a regular basis, I hadn't had a chance to talk to her much. The others, apparently, had known her since the seventh or eighth grade, and thus had more of a relationship with her.

"Are you scared?" I asked her.

"A little." I didn't think Aelita had it in her to lie to me, or to anyone; she'd only ever known telling the truth.

"Don't be. It's not as bad as it seems."

"It doesn't seem bad, just overwhelming," she corrected me. "And I'm only scared because I don't know what to do."

"How do you mean?"

Aelita, fortunately, was spared from answering me by the arrival of my brother, who pulled to a stop in front of the gate and honked his horn at us. I pushed myself off of the wall and headed toward Eric, when all of a sudden the passenger side door opened and Lydia launched herself out of the car and in our direction.

"Aelita! Oh my goodness! Aelita!" She shrieked, running behind the car and onto the sidewalk.

I raised my eyebrows at Lydia and her excessive displays of emotion. Aelita stood stone still, looking like a deer in the headlights (an expression which, unfortunately, wasn't really helped by her actually standing in the headlights of the car). Lydia, seeing that Aelita didn't recognize her, stopped.

"Do you remember me?" She asked Aelita, who still hadn't moved.

Aelita shook her head. "S-should I?"

Lydia shrugged. "You might not. You were pretty young the last time we saw each other, but I'm your cousin. Your mother was my mother's sister."

ZXCVBNM

"You're sure you two are related?" I asked Lydia for probably the seventeenth time that night, and for the seventeenth time she said, "YES."

"I'm sure," she continued. "How could we not be? Look," she said, parting her hair and showing us her scalp. I'd known for years that Lydia's hair wasn't naturally brown—she'd told me she dyed it. What I didn't know was what her natural color was. I'd always assumed it the sort of white blonde only achieved by mutant genetics or bleach, since Lydia penciled in her eyebrows every morning to make them actually show up. Her eyelashes were the same way—they didn't appear if she didn't put mascara on. She had a really fair complexion, too, so it fit. She'd told me she dyed her hair because brunette ballerinas were in higher demand than ballerinas of other hair colors, and I'd believed her. Until tonight.

"Your hair is pink," I said faintly.

To be continued… With 1,000,000% more explanations! (And Franz Hopper!)

ZXCVBNM

So this isn't my best work, but I'm trying. And I apologize for taking seventeen lifetimes to post, _again_, but school is kicking my butt. I thought I would have more time this semester, but I really don't. A lot of what took me so long is that I literally wrote this chapter three times before I found a version that I really liked. On the upside, I know exactly where this story is going with itself, and so barring any more tests of freakish proportions I should be updating more regularly than I have (I know I say that in every authors note at the end of every chapter but I really mean it this time). So. Ima post this, and then go write a research paper on Cherokee creation myths. Oh, the life of an English major…


	8. In Which Everything Makes Sense

A/N: Chapter eight! Who's excited? I AM! This chapter is going to explain a lot of things, as well as set up for a lot more things that have yet to be explained, so get ready!

ZXCVBNM

As soon as we could go to bed without raising any suspicion from my family, Aelita and I locked ourselves in my bedroom. "What should we do?" She asked me, obviously referencing her new-found relation in Lydia.

"We have to tell Jeremie," I said, and was glad that I wasn't the leader of our group. Jeremie may have been young but he always knew what to do. So, I dug my phone out of the side pocket of my backpack, where it lived during the day, and punched in Jeremie's number.

"Hummmngh…?" Jeremie croaked on the other end of the line. Aelita and I looked at each other and snickered, although I had to give the poor boy credit for trying. Jeremie's life was very much defined by the old adage e_arly to bed and early to rise makes a fellow healthy, wealthy, and wise_, and even though it was now eleven P.M., early by my standards, Jeremie had clearly been asleep for several hours.

Jeremie cleared his throat and tried again. "Hello?" he asked, his voice clearer and decidedly less sleepy this time.

"Jeremie, it's Parker. And Aelita."

"What's happening? What's wrong? Is X.A.N.A. attacking?" I heard a lot of rustling going on on Jeremie's end of the phone line and figured he had probably launched himself out of bed and was checking Lyoko's status from his desktop, an assumption that was proved correct when I heard the trademark noise of a computer booting up.

"No, it's not X.A.N.A.," I said. "It's Aelita."

"Is she okay?" The rustling abruptly stopped.

"I'm fine," Aelita answered. "It's just…"

I picked up where she trailed off. "We found out something really interesting involving my sister in law and Aelita's mother. And we think you should know about it."

ZXCVBNM

The next morning was a Saturday so my breakfast table was unusually full, owing to the added presence of Aelita, Connor's fiancée Maggie, Eric's fiancée Lydia, and Lydia's daughter Zoe to a kitchen that normally already held seven people. Maggie only came over on Saturdays so she could see Connor—otherwise they worked the same shifts at the hospital and rarely socialized with the rest of us. Eric, Lydia, and Zoe were different. Lydia lived in the city (read: Paris) because she was a dancer with the ballet company in the city, but she dropped Zoe off with my family during the day so she didn't have to pay for childcare. My granddad was all about babies and was continually dropping hints at the rest of us to have some, so he really didn't mind being saddled with a feisty two-year-old for the morning.

There wasn't enough room for us all to sit at the table, so Aelita and I sat on the counter on either side of the sink and wolfed down a plate of waffles that Connor had oh-so-kindly made for us that morning ("Respect your elders!" Dan had barked at me when I'd tried to snag the last two seats at the table, which he and Dad had wanted). Once breakfast was over, Aelita and I headed back to my room to grab our things.

Lydia had agreed to drive us to Kadic that morning so Aelita could get her dorm room and I could spend the day hanging out with my friends. At least, that's what my family thought I was doing. In reality, Aelita and I and the others were going to spend the day trying to figure out what the jank was up with all these weird new family connections.

Jeremie and I had sent out quick S.O.S. texts the night before to the others telling them to meet us on campus before lunch, so by the time Aelita and I were on campus the others were waiting for us outside of headmaster Delmas's office. Jeremie, Aelita and I had also decided the night before that it was probably in everyone's best interests if we asked Lydia to meet us once she got done with work for the afternoon, just to confirm to everyone else that she and Aelita were, in fact, cousins.

"But come alone," I said to her. "It's not that I don't want to see Eric, but that we have some things to ask you that we don't want him to hear." I said it bluntly, because with Lydia blunt was always better. I knew it probably wouldn't change her reaction, but it was worth a shot anyways.

"Is everything okay?" Lydia, stopped at a red light, turned backwards to look at me. "Are you in trouble?"

"I'm not in trouble." I crossed my eyes at her. "Really, it's nothing special or dangerous, just something that you might know but Eric might not. It's really a need-to-know situation."

Lydia nodded like she understood, which I knew she didn't, and turned back to the road once the light turned green. We spent the rest of the drive to Kadic listening to a Top 40 satellite station out of America, so that was kind of the end of our discussion.

ZXCVBNM

"They're related," Ulrich said flatly, staring between the high school graduation picture of Lydia, in all her pink-haired glory, and Aelita, who just raised her eyebrows back at Ulrich. I'd stolen the picture out of Eric's wallet that morning when he wasn't paying attention, and had sneaked it to school, where I'd shown it to Jeremie first. Once we all sat down for lunch, I slid the picture across the table to my friends, who were staring at it in shock and awe.

"Let me see that." Odd snatched the picture from his roommate and stared goggle-eyed at it, mouth hanging open in shock. "Dang, you two look alike! Well. Who woulda thunk it?"

"The point is," I said over the general babble that broke out over Odd's comment, "that Aelita has a family. And that as far as I know, they're still alive."

They all sat still for a second, chewing their lunches as they thought over what I'd just said. Then Yumi spoke. "Well, I think it's good we're meeting your sister in law after this. She might not know any more than she's already told you, but she might, and it could be really useful."

"What else could she know?" Odd asked, but Jeremie nodded in agreement at Yumi.

"Lydia knew she was my cousin. That means she knew my parents. It would be nice to learn something about them, even if she doesn't know where they are," Aelita said. It was the most words I'd heard her put into a sentence since she'd come to earth.

"You're right," Yumi said. "And I think the more we can find out about your parents, the better."

After lunch we went back to the little coffee shop we'd been at the day before, mostly because they had incredible oatmeal raisin cookies and a used bookstore in the back. Ulrich and Yumi took off by themselves for a while since they weren't the cookie-eating, coffee-drinking, book-reading types, but Jeremie and Aelita promptly buried themselves in the computer section. Odd and I took a different approach and wound up reading the poetry of Ben Johnson over the biggest cookie I'd ever seen in my life. Odd probably could have eaten the whole thing in one sitting, but I didn't stand a chance, which was why I'd demanded that he split it with me.

"I didn't peg you as a Ben Johnson kind of person," he said to me around a mouthful of cookie.

"Neither did I," I said. "I mean, about you. Didn't you fail my dad's English class last year?"

"I passed. With a D." He smiled. "And we didn't cover any Ben Johnson, as far as I remember."

"Hm." I frowned. "I guess I just didn't figure you were really the studious type. As in, you don't do anything unless you have to."

"Now that," he said, turning the page without looking at me, "is not true."

"Oh really? When was the last time you learned something just because you wanted to and not because someone made you?"

"Just because school isn't really my thing doesn't mean I don't do other things. I can play the guitar because I taught myself. And I taught myself to draw. Look," he said, pulling a tiny notebook out of his back pocket—no, a sketchbook, I corrected myself, when he flipped it open and pointed to a drawing of me.

In the sketch, I had my back turned to him, my feet propped up on the empty chair next to me, and I was reading a book. As soon as I looked at the sketch I remembered the day it was drawn, although I hadn't even known he'd been drawing me until that second. I felt just a little like I'd had my personal bubble violated, but it also made me happy that Odd had even taken the time to draw me.

So I gave him an accusatory glare. "You didn't ask?"

He shrugged. "You didn't say no."

I rolled my eyes. "What do your parents think about you and your mad skillz?"

Odd just laughed. "My parents are way too easy to please. Everything I do, it's all, 'Good job, Odd! Oh, you made a D? At least it's not an F! Oh, you made an F? Well, you didn't get kicked out of school!' I think if I actually did get kicked out of school, they'd congratulate me. It's kind of funny. It always bothers me that my dad's not stricter than he is, since he was in the military for so long. Maybe it's given him an aversion to rules."

"Man. My dad doesn't let us bring home anything worse than a C. A C plus," I amended. "Because he considers anything worse than a 75 failing. It's really more of a 'do your best' policy, I guess, because Dan could get away with D's. But he gets away with a lot because he's the oldest."

"Adele caught it too," Odd said. "And you can't sneak anything past your parents because you're the baby. Or at least, that's how it is at my house. But I think if I brought home a C, my parents would think something was wrong with me." He shrugged. "But, I'm not planning on going to college, so terrible grades don't really matter to me."

"Why not?" I asked, and closed the book since good ol' Ben seemed to have been forgotten for the moment.

"Are you kidding? Four more years of school on top of the two and a half I still have to finish? No thank you. I'd rather be an artist." He rolled his eyes and reached for the poetry book, but I slapped my hand down on top of it.

"What if you don't make it as an artist? Or can't?" I asked. "You need to consider other options."

"Now you sound like Adele. My sister," he said, when I looked confusedly at him. "She's the oldest. She's already out of college. She did the whole marriage and babies and perfect life thing." He shrugged, flapping his hand over his shoulder. "Give me your opinion. Do you think I could make it as an artist?" He tossed me the sketchbook across the table, but I missed and it went skittering across the hardwood floor of the coffee shop. I rolled my eyes and went to retrieve it.

I was no art critic, but I had to admit as I thumbed through it that he was pretty good. "You could go to art school," I suggested.

"Why are you so fixated on the idea of higher education?" he asked, crossing his legs under the table. "Sorry," he said, when his foot bumped into mine, but he left it where it was. We were good enough friends that touching didn't really bother us anymore.

"I'm not fixated," I said. "It's just understood in my family that you graduate high school and go on to college. Everybody's making a big stink out of Mason just wanting to be a runner when he finishes school. My dad's pretty cheesed off about it."

"What about you? What do you want to do when you graduate?"

"Well, nothing as exciting as art school. College, for sure. I really like learning. There's just… There are so many things I don't know, and I don't feel right unless I'm spending time learning something new."

"You nerd," he said.

"It doesn't have to be book smarts!" I defended myself. "Just some kind of new knowledge. Like learning how to play the guitar. Or chess! I've always wanted to learn how to play chess."

"Now you just sound English," he said. "Like an old English gentleman. Chess and poetry and learning…" He rolled his eyes at me but was obviously picturing me in a tuxedo and top hat.

"Well, I am American, after all. We started as an English colony," I couldn't resist pointing out. "So you're at least half right."

Odd just laughed and reached for the poetry book.

ZXCVBNM

Ulrich and Yumi showed up at about ten till three, and Lydia showed up right at three, when we'd asked her to come. She was still dressed in her dance clothes and had a gym bag slung over one shoulder—she'd told me how much her pointe shoes had cost, so I supported her decision to not leave them unattended in her car. Once everyone had had time to get more coffee or hot chocolate or oatmeal raisin cookies, we all convened

"You were really young when it happened," Lydia said, looking pointedly at me. "Maybe three or four, if you were even that old. Eric used to keep you once he got out of school for the afternoon, and I kept Aelita in the afternoons for her dad, my Uncle Franz—Franz Hopper—after her mother died. Since Eric and I were dating then, you two used to play together. As much as you can when you're that small," she smiled, obviously thinking of Zoe, her own adopted daughter, who was two years old and probably the real offspring of a pair of Tasmanian Devils.

"So what happened?" Jeremie asked, pinching the bridge of his nose again, and I realized that I'd neglected to tell my friends about Lydia's rather circuitous method of storytelling. Most of the time she was sitting next to Eric when she was telling stories, and when she got off track he would stomp on her toes underneath the table. We'd asked Lydia to come alone, though, so the task of keeping her on task apparently fell to me.

"Well, Uncle Franz used to work at Kadic—I think Mrs. Hertz replaced him once he and Aelita moved to Canada. I didn't even know you'd gone," she said, smiling at Aelita. "I showed up one day to pick you up, and nobody was there. I thought it was weird, but every time I tried to look for you two I just hit a dead end. When I didn't hear from you for a while, I just assumed you'd moved away."

"_What HAPPENED?"_ I hissed at her, and stomped on her toes. Lydia gave me the stink eye and turned back to the story.

"Anyways, Franz was working on some project for the government in addition to teaching, so I always picked you up from the factory just off Kadic's grounds. He had an office set up down in the basement, with this wicked sweet computer system and a holographic map and everything."

All six of us paled considerably at Lydia's description of the first floor of the Lyoko control room. I wasn't sure if the others were considering the implications of what Lydia had just told us, but I sure was. Lydia knew Aelita's father, for one. She knew what had happened to Aelita's mother. She knew where the factory was, and what was in it, even if she may not have known its significance.

She might even know about Lyoko.

Like he had read my mind, Jeremie cleared his throat to get Lydia's attention. "Lydia… does the word 'Lyoko' mean anything to you?"

I don't know what we were expecting. I think at least some of us were waiting on Lydia to jump up and proclaim how glad she was that she wasn't the only one who knew about Lyoko. The realistic side of me argued, in the split second between Jeremie's question and Lydia's answer, that Lydia probably didn't know or she would have already asked Aelita about it, probably the night before.

True to my assumptions, Lydia just shrugged. "No. Should it?"

Jeremie cleared his throat and looked at the rest of us, I guess for permission to tell Lydia what was really going on. I sat stone-faced and unreadable because I didn't want to give the wrong answer, but from across the table I saw Ulrich give a tiny nod of assent. Yumi looked down at the table in a gesture of approval, and I could tell from the way Odd shifted slightly in his seat that he was giving Jeremie the go-ahead as well.

And Jeremie, at the edge of a cliff and with no way to go but forward, jumped.

ZXCVBNM

"A virtual world? Are you sure you aren't making this up? Am I on an episode of Punk'd?" Lydia took her eyes off the road for a second and turned to stare at Jeremie in his perch in the passenger seat of Lydia's car.

Jeremie just smiled at her and shook his head, quite the picture of composition for such a young person. I had to keep reminding myself that he was only fourteen, because I was continuously blown away by the fact that he had already discovered an entire WORLD. His smarticles made him seem older than he was. "I assure you I am not."

We'd told her everything, from Jeremie's discovery of the factory while on a quest for spare robot parts to my bizarre remembrance of X.A.N.A. attacks. We decided not to go into detail about any of X.A.N.A.'s recent attacks, including the ones on me and on Mason, because we were afraid that she'd inadvertently say something to my father about it and either be committed to a loony bin or blow everyone's cover. We had told her, however, who X.A.N.A. was and how we'd found Aelita, which immediately explained why Aelita didn't know or recognize Lydia or have any memories of her family. We'd told her how it seemed weird that X.A.N.A. had let us just waltz in and materialize Aelita without even putting up a fight, and Jeremie mentioned how weird he thought that was. In all the chaos and hubbub of the last 24 hours I honestly hadn't given X.A.N.A a second thought until now, but it _was_ weird that he'd just let us walk into his territory and take his prisoners.

Aelita wasn't the only one who didn't remember things. It turned out that there was a fair bit of stuff relating to Aelita that I didn't remember at all, but that could have had to do with the fact that I was very, very young when it happened. As it was, I didn't remember ever having met Aelita, or her father, but apparently Aelita and I had been attached at the hip when I was younger.

Something else I didn't remember was the day I'd been attacked by X.A.N.A.

It was what Lydia had been trying to tell us at the beginning of our conversation before she got sidetracked by Jeremie's huge revelation. I hadn't been but four, she said, and Aelita was younger than that. Lydia had come to get Aelita from the factory after school and had brought me and Eric in with her. As the four of us were leaving, one of the plugs on the wall had started smoking and had actually started a fire, which promptly filled the room with pungent black smoke. Aelita and I had been scared, Lydia said, so she was trying to get us to stop wailing like banshees and hadn't noticed the ball of electricity in the smoke until it was too late.

The ball had bumped into me. "It's almost funny, when I think back about it," she said. "Your hair stood straight up and I think if the room had been dark I could have seen your bones through your skin like they show in cartoons. Eric thought it was ball lightning that hit you. That's something I still don't understand." She ran her fingers through her hair; now that I knew what I was looking for, I _could_ tell that her roots were pink. "Lightning only happens outside. How could ball lightning get inside and down three stories? I don't understand." She paused, then added, "And ball lightning is really rare. Only like three percent of people ever see it."

"One percent," Jeremie corrected her. "And it was probably X.A.N.A.. That's the only thing that makes sense to me."

"Well whatever it was, it disappeared right after it touched Parker. You were probably only in the lightning, or whatever it was, for a few seconds, but it seemed like forever to me. And to Eric. We picked you up and made sure you were okay, and then we took you and Aelita back to your house and didn't tell your father," she said, meaning my father. "I still don't think he knows about it."

"Why all the secrecy?" I asked. "And what if my brains had been scrambled?"

"They weren't. We'd have realized if they were," Lydia said flatly. "And Uncle Franz asked me not to tell anyone. Since you were okay, I didn't think I needed to."

"Well, okay. That makes sense," I conceded, because I was thinking of all the X.A.N.A. attacks I hadn't told anyone about. "But if my mother was alive and she found out about this, I think she might just brain you with Papa's cast-iron frying pan."

"You aren't mad, are you?" She asked, genuinely worried. I was sitting directly behind her; no matter what way she twisted, she couldn't look directly at me, but had to settle for watching my reactions in the rearview mirror.

I scooted sideways, dislodging Odd (who gave a grunt of protest, muffled by my shoulder in his face) and put my head between the driver and passenger seats. "No. I'm not mad. Promise."

"Good," she said.

"Do you think maybe that was the first X.A.N.A. attack?" Jeremie asked, looking back at me. "I mean, the one that made you remember all the others?"

I thought for a second. "Maybe? I don't know enough about X.A.N.A. to answer that," I said. "But it's possible."

"Well I do, and I think it's the answer we've been missing. Think about it. If X.A.N.A. tried to attack you, or to possess you, he may not have been evolved enough to do it successfully. I think he left a piece of himself behind in you, and that's why you've remembered the X.A.N.A. attacks you've been a part of."

"Wait. There's a part of X.A.N.A. in me?" I asked, and I fought the impulse to stare at myself in the car's rearview mirror like I could see X.A.N.A. in me.

"Maybe not anymore. Listen," he said, when I protested that his explanations made no sense. "In the beginning, when you first went to Lyoko, your arrow and Aelita's were the same color because you were both a part of Lyoko. Yours was yellow because X.A.N.A. was a part of you but X.A.N.A. is also a part of Lyoko, and you were tied to Lyoko through him." The car slowed to a stop, and Lydia let it idle for a second, then shut the engine off. Jeremie kept speaking. "When you touched that screen for the first time, you showed X.A.N.A. where you were and he reclaimed that part of himself that he left in you. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. And since you and X.A.N.A. aren't linked anymore, you aren't linked to Lyoko and your arrow is green."

We mulled this over for a minute. "I think you're right," I finally said. "That makes sense to me."

Lydia cleared her throat to remind us that we had arrived at our destination. "I'm surprised this place is still standing. But I guess if your father isn't officially dead, then he still owns it, not France, so the city wouldn't have torn it down."

Lydia had promised to drive us to Aelita's childhood home, so we had all piled into her car in a quite illegal manner and had managed to fit seven people into a car made for five (well, five and a half, really, since the front console folded back to make a seat for someone really skinny). Jeremie, Aelita, and Lydia sat in the front seat, but I had to share the back with Yumi and Ulrich, who got their own seats, while I had to sit in Odd's lap. I think Lydia planned it that way on purpose, and I had made a mental note to get my hands on that frying pan once we got home.

We had driven down a paved road for a while, but then the asphalt had ended and we'd pulled onto a dirt road which stretched into the woods that marked the boundary of Kadic's property. Lydia had parked her car in the front yard of an old, dilapidated white house, and we were currently standing in the front yard trying to work up the courage to walk through the wrought-iron gate and into the house itself.

"What if it's haunted?" Odd asked in a dramatic stage whisper, elbowing me in the side and pointing to where a rusty screen door swung on broken hinges in the afternoon breeze.

"Are you kidding? Franz Hopper isn't dead," I said, and elbowed my way past my friends and into the house to prove that there was no vengeful ghost bent on destroying us.

There wasn't. The house was full of dust and broken glass, and it looked like thieves had moved in and ransacked the place. It had certainly been vacant for a while. Furniture was toppled over and papers were strewn about like someone had taken a giant stack of them and tossed them into the wind. A heavy layer of dust covered everything, and leaves and papers swirled on the floor in the breeze, since several of the windows were broken.

Aelita stood in the middle of the room, her face illuminated by a shaft of sunlight which filtered in through the dust motes in the air. She turned in a slow circle like she was trying to get a feel for the room. "I used to live here?"

Lydia nodded. "You and your father moved here after your mother died, and you lived here until you were maybe six, when you moved. Or I guess went to Loco."

"_LY_oko," We all corrected her in unison.

"Right. Lyoko. Look at this." Lydia pulled a picture frame down from the mantle and handed it to Aelita. "That's you and your mother."

Aelita's mother had pink hair too, and she was a dead ringer for Lydia. What was it with all these pink-haired women looking like one another? True, I didn't have any female relatives besides my mother, but when she was alive, even though we'd both been gingers, we didn't look much like each other in the face. We resembled each other in mannerisms, though, or so my father said.

Aelita and her mother looked a little like each other, but Aelita really resembled her father, who was in the next picture that Lydia pulled out of the dust. Franz Hopper had a bushy beard and Albert Einstein hair colored salt and pepper gray, but barring the hirsuteness of his person, Aelita and her father resembled each other. A lot. It was in their eyes and they had the exact same nose, but it was more than that, too. They both gave off this identical vibe. I didn't even know Franz Hopper and had never in my life met him (or apparently I had, but I didn't remember it) but when I looked from his picture to Aelita, I could just tell. They both had the same personalities. If I'd been a believer in auras, I would have said that their auras were the exact same shade of light bluish-green.

"That's my father?" She asked, her voice wavering close to tears. She was staring at her reflection on the glass of the picture frame and then focusing on her father's face. "We look alike."

"You really do," Lydia said, and suddenly Aelita sat down with a whump in a flurry of dust on the sofa, one of the only upright pieces of furniture in the room, and put her head in her hands.

While the others crowded around Aelita and tried to comfort her, I walked in a circuit around the room, dusting off the walls and photographs and trying to figure out anything I could about Aelita's history. By the time I got around to inspecting the mantle Aelita had stopped crying. I stood on the hearth and fingered my way through the dust, just feeling along for anything we might have missed, when my elbow bumped the framed picture of a tree hanging centered on the mantle. As I tried to set it straight again I noticed that there was a hole in the wall behind the picture. I removed the frame from its hooks and set it carefully down on the hearth, then reached into the wall and pulled out… a thing.

"What's this?" Lydia asked, reaching to take it from me. At first it appeared to be just a freakishly large dust bunny but turned out, after some industrious attempts to rid the object of ten years worth of accumulated dust, to be a doll. An elf, in fact. Jeremie thought it was a little gnome, but Ulrich quickly set him straight.

"You're both wrong. It's Mr. Puck," Aelita said faintly. "That's Mr. Puck."

"How do you remember that?" Jeremie asked, reaching for the doll and studying it carefully.

"I don't know. I just… I just know," Aelita said.

"What's this?" There was something hanging around Mr. Puck's neck, like a necklace. At first I thought it might have just been a part of his clothes, but it wasn't attached to him in any way other than being placed around his neck by someone. On purpose. Which meant it was probably important. I pulled a key off of Mr. Puck's neck and brushed the grime away from it.

"It's a key," Jeremie said, like I was a slow child.

"I know _that_, Einstein." I rolled my eyes at him and went back to studying the key.

"I think what she means is, what does it go to?" Odd translated for me, taking the key out of my hands and gawking at it. "Look at this. 'Paris Train Station'," he read aloud.

"Well it's obviously important," Yumi said.

Aelita nodded. "My… My dad probably put it there so he wouldn't lose it."

The same idea popped into our heads at the exact same moment, and all six of us turned to stare beady-eyed at Lydia like we were hungry baby birds and she had a mouthful of worms. "What, you want me to drive you to the train station?" she guessed, and even though she acted like we were just _such_ an imposition, she was already digging through her purse for her keys; she was obviously just as excited about solving this mystery as we were.

"Yes," I said. "I want to see what this key goes to."

ZXCVBNM

"Maybe it goes to an overhead bin," Odd suggested. "Like to lock it and stuff."

"You don't lock overhead bins!" I exclaimed. "What, have you never ridden a train before?"

"Not the ones in Paris!" he shot back. "And in Italy I only ride them when we're in Rome. My parents live out in the country. My dad didn't want to deal with people anymore once he retired from the military."

"Well, you don't lock overhead bins in France," I said. "They're public. Anyone can use them."

"Anyone? Even if they aren't riding a train?"

I thwacked him on the back of the head with some of the rolled up papers we'd collected from Aelita's house like he was a bad dog. "You know what I meant! Cut it out!"

"Stop flirting!" Lydia hissed at me as she passed us. We had come to the train station and immediately split up in search of whatever it was the key went to. So far Odd and I had checked out the men's bathroom (mostly because Odd had a bladder the size of a peanut and had to pee every fifteen minutes) and the hallway outside the bathroom, where we were currently arguing about overhead bins.

I opened my mouth to fry Lydia with a scathing remark but then closed it as Ulrich and Yumi appeared with Jeremie and Aelita in tow. "I know what this goes to," Jeremie said, dangling the key between his thumb and index finger, snatching it away when Odd made a grab for it.

"Really? What?" Odd asked him. "It doesn't go to anything in the bathroom."

"…No. It doesn't," Jeremie agreed. "It goes to a locker."

"How did you figure that out so fast? We've barely been here ten minutes!" Lydia asked.

I wanted to remind Lydia that Jeremie and Aelita were both freakishly smart and that even though they were young, they were in possession of some serious reasoning skills. I figured that they must have put their heads together and come up with this answer logically, but Aelita proved me wrong when she just smiled at Lydia and said, "We asked at the ticket counter."

"Hey, why didn't you think of that?" Odd asked, elbowing me in the ribs.

"Well, we didn't have the key, so we couldn't have asked anyone what it went to because we would have had nothing to show them," I answered, and elbowed back harder. He winced. Good, I thought. Maybe I left a bruise.

"We could have had the key! Jeremie just doesn't trust us with it." Odd actually pouted a little.

I thwacked him on the back of the head again. "No, he doesn't trust _you_ with it. I'm perfectly trustworthy. You lose everything."

"I haven't lost my head," he pointed out.

"That's because it's attached to your neck!" I threw my hands up in the air in a someone-kill-me-now gesture. It was true, though. Odd was notorious for being as scatterbrained as an old British lady. He frequently came to class sans shoes because he couldn't find them, and once had come still in his pajamas because he had done laundry the night before and then couldn't remember which washer his clothes were in. Odd just smiled at me. I stomped on his toes when no one was looking.

The lockers were all together in a room off the main terminal of the train station. The locker number was the number etched on the front of the key so at least we didn't have to deal with any confusion about which locker the key went to. In fact, it was all very anti-climactic. Instead of having to go on a big search or a wild goose chase to find the right locker, Jeremie just slid the key right in and popped the locker open.

"A briefcase?" Lydia asked upon seeing what was inside the locker. It was, in fact, a briefcase, with stack of CDs inside. And that was all that was in the locker. I had halfway been expecting Franz Hopper's cremated remains, or a duffel bag full of cash, or a sack lunch left over from fifteen years earlier. But it was just a briefcase and a stack of CDs.

"Hm." Jeremie pulled his laptop out of his backpack and dragged everything over to a nearby bench so we could get out of the main traffic flow, and after a few minutes of busily clacking away on his keyboard, he emerged with a victorious "aha!"

"They're Franz Hopper's diaries," he explained to the rest of us. "But they're encrypted. Heavily encrypted."

"How long do you need to break the encryption?" Odd asked, peering over Jeremie's shoulder at the computer screen like he could make a diagnosis. Odd's department was art, not computers, and he knew it. "A few weeks?"

"Maybe a few years; this is some tough stuff." Jeremie frowned and cracked his knuckles. "Okay. Let's get to work."

To be continued… with 356.8% more flirting and shenanigans!

ZXCVBNM

So now we're moving into part two of this story! I've got everything set up and am now about to get to the good stuff, so if you've been contemplating running away because of my sucky writing abilities (I think I just kind of lost it there for a while. Anyone else ever go through a dry spell?) then you should really reevaluate and stick around for another few chapters since things are about to get really interesting. As in, in the next chapter. Flirting! Time jumps! Shenanigans, mayhem and chaos! And other things that are more exciting when you punctuate them with an exclamation mark!

Until next time,

Lily


	9. In Which We Compare XANA to Voldemort

A/N: No, I haven't dropped off the face of the planet. I _have_ had finals, more finals, and even more finals, followed by a summer spent building houses in Tennessee. Thankfully I'm back at college now! Wahoo! At least I have a schedule, and on the weeks when I don't have four papers due I have lots of quality uninterrupted writing time (but I'm not going to promise an update schedule—I've learned my lesson).

Also, Emilie hasn't made an appearance in several chapters but I decided that I liked what she was bringing to the story, so she's back. I might go back and add her in a few of the past chapters. Kind of depends on how I feel.

So. I present to you the next chapter (as promised, filled with 356.8% more flirting and shenanigans)!

ZXCVBNM

By the time November rolled around I'd settled into this new routine of having a whole new set of friends bigger than any friend group I'd ever had. At first I wasn't sure where I stood with Jeremie and Company. We were united, it seemed to me, only by a mutual desire to find out what was going on with X.A.N.A. and Aelita (and me). When we found the diaries I knew it was a turning point; I could either step back and let them continue their quest on their own, or I could make the commitment to stick with them through the end.

No matter how happy I was with Odd and the others, I always felt a little weird when I saw Emilie at school when I was surrounded by so much love and she was obviously alone. There was a malicious part of myself that kept reminding me that she had done it to herself, but there was another, kinder part of me that always felt bad for her.

"What happened to you guys?" Ulrich asked, after catching one too many significant glances between Emilie and me. Emilie and I never made eye contact _on purpose_ but when we did make eye contact we always looked away very quickly and pretended like we didn't see each other; it was some sort of unspoken code between us. I thought it was funny that Ulrich was just now noticing our friendship, given that a large part of the friendship between us (Emilie and me, not me and Ulrich) had been formed around a mutual love of Ulrich Stern, Class Hottie. Now that I knew Ulrich as a friend (and strongly suspected that there was some sort of romantic tension between him and Yumi) I would have never hit on him or told him that I used to like him. But Ulrich, as it turned out, was pretty quick on the uptake and didn't really need to be told.

"You guys used to be best friends," he said, not as a question but as a statement. That meant he had at least noticed us prior to the dissolution of our friendship. "And you both used to hit on me; I remember that now."

"What?" I spluttered, because the moment had gone from awkward eye contact with Emilie to more awkward define-the-relationship with Ulrich.

"You weren't exactly subtle. And I'm not dumb," he said.

"I thought we were being subtle," I said, and stole a sip of his grape soda so my mouth would be full and I wouldn't have to speak again for a while.

Ulrich just smiled. "What happened to you guys?"

I took my sweet time in swallowing, but after a while the carbonation and acidity of the soda made my mouth start to burn. "It's a long story," I said. "We had a bad fight this summer and now we aren't speaking."

"Hm." He said, after taking a sip of his soda. "She used to date your brother, didn't she?"

ZXCVBNM

Jeremie had finished decoding Franz Hopper's diaries at the end of October, but wouldn't show them to us until he read them all first. Given that Jeremie did roughly as much schoolwork as the rest of us combined I didn't think we would _ever_ get to see the diaries, but I was proven wrong when I walked through the front gate of the school one morning and was surrounded by Jeremie and Company. They shouted a few excuses at my brothers and then hauled me off in the direction of Jeremie's dorm.

"I finished!" Jeremie proclaimed on the way, literally hopping with excitement. "I finished reading the diaries!"

"Are we going to have time to talk about all of them before school starts?" I asked dubiously; it was 7:45 and the last I remembered there were _a lot_ of CDs in that briefcase. Exactly how much information was there to go over?

"Probably not," Jeremie said, confirming my suspicions. "But we can at least get started. And we can go over the big stuff."

"There's big stuff?" Odd asked. "What could be bigger than X.A.N.A.?"

"There's big stuff," Jeremie and Aelita chorused together, and I realized that Aelita probably already knew everything because a) it pertained to her, and b) she was smart enough to actually be of use to Jeremie in decoding the diaries. I wasn't convinced that there wasn't a little bit of a romantic spark going on between them, too. Given Jeremie's shyness and Aelita's naiveté concerning the romantic ways of the world I wasn't sure that anything would ever happen, but it was still cute to see them hitting on each other.

"What big stuff?" I asked, hitching my backpack higher on my shoulders and I marched up the stairs to Jeremie's dorm. The boy's dorm was roughly as old as God, which meant it was built before the advent of electricity and therefore had no elevator. Jeremie lived on the third floor. It was terrible.

Jeremie didn't answer me until we were safely ensconced in his room, but once the door was securely shut behind him he sat down with a whump in his computer chair and swiveled to face us. "There's big stuff. The biggest one is that there's a fifth sector of Lyoko that none of us knew about."

"Huuuumngh?" All of us chorused together, wearing identical expressions of shock.

"I don't really know a lot about it," he confessed. "But from what I read, it's kind of like the on-Lyoko control room of Lyoko. Hopper talked about it more like the brawn of the place and less like the glitz of the other four sectors."

"Have you been there yet?" I asked, and then could have smacked myself on the face because I _knew_ that Jeremie never went to Lyoko. In fact, I didn't think he'd ever been.

"I haven't ever been to Lyoko," he said, just to prove me right. "I probably should, if X.A.N.A. is going to continue to make a habit of possessing people. But the other high points," he swiveled in his chair to pull another screen up on his desktop, "are that we found out a lot about Aelita's family. And we also discovered that X.A.N.A. gets stronger every time we return to the past."

"Well, jank," I muttered. I'd only been on this team for about three months but we'd gone back in time about twenty times since I'd met them, and they'd been doing this since the seventh grade.

"Is there any way to keep X.A.N.A. from getting stronger?" Odd asked.

Jeremie shook his head. "I don't think so. That's not even the worst part; the worst part is that Hopper spent about eight years going back in time daily so that he could build Lyoko. X.A.N.A. wasn't even that much of a malevolent presence before Hopper spent all that time returning to the past."

"Ouch." Ulrich tossed his backpack on the floor and sat down; evidently, he had decided that this was going to take a while.

As if on cue, Jeremie looked at his watch. "It's 7:55," He said. "Should we keep talking, or skip first period?"

"Skip," we all chorused flatly.

"If we're going to get out of here without attracting a lot of suspicion we need to do it _now_, while there are still a lot of people walking around outside. Once classes start we'll get caught. Especially if all of us are together," Jeremie said.

"To the bat cave!" I said, thrusting a finger in the air and leading the way to the coffee shop down the road.

ZXCVBNM

"So what else have you found out about Lyoko?" I looked across the table and raised my eyebrows at Jeremie, who was sipping a mug of steaming black coffee and sharing half of a gargantuan muffin with Aelita.

"We found out a lot about my family," Aelita answered, brushing a strand of pink hair behind her ear. "My mother was kidnapped by the government, probably to get Franz Hopper to stop work on Lyoko. It started as a government project, but then the government abandoned it."

"Hopper didn't want to quit, so he didn't," Jeremie continued. "He and his wife were building Lyoko, together, but then one day she was kidnapped. He and Aelita changed their last name to Hopper—it was Aelita's mother's maiden name—from Schaefer. They moved here to escape notice, and once Lyoko was built Hopper transported himself and Aelita there, probably to avoid being kidnapped."

"Dirty government," I said in jest, leaning back in my chair and crossing my legs under the table. Then I sobered up. "Your mother was really kidnapped by the government?" I asked Aelita.

She nodded sadly. "He said he never saw her again."

"Do you remember her?" I asked. I knew what it was like to have a missing mother, although Aelita's case was a little different from mine. I clung to every memory of my mother with a burning stubbornness; Aelita had no recollection of her life before Jeremie turned the supercomputer on and thus didn't remember either of her parents. She referred to Franz Hopper as exactly that, Franz Hopper, instead of treating him more familiarly as "dad", because of how the rest of us referred to him. How much worse would it have been, I wondered, if I didn't even remember my mother? At least I had those memories to get me through the times when I just needed to be a girl and cry on my mommy's shoulder. Aelita had nothing.

She shook her head again. "I don't remember her. Not at all."

ZXCVBNM

That afternoon at lunch we all agreed that the next step in the equation was to take an exploratory trip to the fifth sector after school let out. If there was any more information to be found about Franz Hopper, Jeremie thought it would be found there since the notes in Hopper's diaries indicated that the fifth sector wasn't like the other four; rather, it was described more as "the guts" of Lyoko and less like "the glitz" of the other sectors. I couldn't imagine that there was all that much more to know about the man—there had been _a lot_ of CDs in that briefcase—but Jeremie just shook his head.

"I don't really know all that much about him," he said when I voiced my opinion. "I know about his work. That's about it. It's like reading every single scientific paper that someone has ever written and then claiming to know them intimately because of it. You know about what they've studied, but not about who they actually _are_."

"Hey, so, speaking of Franz Hopper," I said, not that we had been talking about anything else, "What if he's still on Lyoko? You brought Aelita back, can't you bring him back?"

"Why on earth would he still be in Lyoko?" Odd asked me.

I rolled my eyes at him and tapped him on the forehead. "Think about it. He sent himself and Aelita to Lyoko in order to avoid being kidnapped by the government. If Aelita was still there when we turned the supercomputer back on, then presumably Franz Hopper is as well."

"I'd actually already thought of that. He doesn't have a physical form on Lyoko because he doesn't show up on my scans. But he might still _be_ there. It's like X.A.N.A.," he explained to Yumi and Odd, who were clearly trying to wrap their heads around this scenario. "He doesn't have a physical form but he is obviously still present on Lyoko."

"Well, okay. That makes sense," Yumi conceded. "But how do you find something that doesn't have a physical form? We don't even know what X.A.N.A. looks like; all he does is send his monsters after us."

"If we _did_ find X.A.N.A. in physical form, would we be able to defeat him?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Jeremie said to me, "because I don't think he _has_ a physical form. Think about it this way. You've read Harry Potter, right?"

"Well, I read most of them," I said. "I quit after the fourth one because J.K. Rowling started killing off all the characters I liked."

"The important part is, you read about how Voldemort got his physical form back even though he'd been floating around as this bodiless _thing_ for fourteen years. X.A.N.A. is the same way. He doesn't have a body but he still exists."

"Jeez, Belpois," Ulrich said. "I didn't know you were such a Potterhead."

"I like to indulge in a little harmless reading every now and then, yes," Jeremie said stiffly. "Harry Potter is just one of the books I like to read."

"Don't hate." I elbowed Ulrich in the ribs harder than was really necessary and was satisfied to hear a muffled "Oof!" in reply. "The man was just putting it in terms the rest of us mere mortals can understand. Thank you," I said to Jeremie. "But my point is, Voldemort got his physical form back. Can X.A.N.A. also acquire a physical form?"

"I think that's what he was trying to do when he tried to possess _you_," Jeremie said. "And if he can do it here, I don't see why he can't do it on Lyoko. Franz Hopper never discussed that possibility because he never encountered it."

"Okay, so what if we just shut the supercomputer down?" Odd asked. "And turned Lyoko off and stuff. Wouldn't that kill X.A.N.A.?"

"Not without killing Aelita, too," Jeremie reminded him. "She's still a part of Lyoko."

"_I_ was a part of Lyoko, and I didn't die when the supercomputer got turned off the first time," I said.

"Yes, but the difference is, your father didn't write you into the codes of Lyoko. You only had a little part of X.A.N.A. in you, and that didn't even matter because he was dormant until we turned the system back on," Jeremie said. I shuddered—it always gave me the creeps to think that I'd lived for fourteen years of my life housing a part of me that was not my own. "Aelita and Lyoko are linked together," Jeremie continued, "and until I can figure out how to sever the link between them without killing her we have to leave the computer on. Plus there's a chance that Franz Hopper is still trapped inside Lyoko; it would be like murder to shut the computer down knowing that he might still be there."

"Technically he wouldn't be dead, but it would be close enough," Aelita clarified. "If we turned the computer off he would still be alive when we turned it back on. It doesn't matter; either way we would have to free him or he would just spend the rest of eternity living on Lyoko as a formless _thing_, asleep with no way to wake up. That would be like murder."

ZXCVBNM

I ran by my dad's classroom after school let out to let him know that I was going to stay late to study and hang out with my friends. I tried to be deliberately vague about what time I'd be done because I really didn't know, so instead I told him I'd just call when I was done. My dad, bless his soul, didn't suspect a thing. From there I went back to the science building, where everyone else was standing around waiting on me.

"Late again," Ulrich teased me, and I stuck my tongue out at him even though I knew he didn't really mean it.

"I'm not that late. Just…" I checked my watch and winced. Ulrich was right—I _was_ late. "Okay, well, twenty minutes is better than thirty!"

Odd rolled his eyes at me. "Down the rabbit hole with you!"

"You better watch it," I said flatly once I was down the ladder and Odd and I were walking slightly ahead of the others. "One of these days I'm going to push you into the sewer when you aren't paying attention."

"Mm-hmm. I don't think you have the guts to actually do it," he teased me, dancing backwards and waggling his hands above his ears in a manner that just demanded I prove to him I wasn't joking.

So, I did.

ZXCVBNM

"Pshew," Ulrich waved his hands in front of his nose for about the eighteenth time. "What stinks?"

"I'm going to shove _you_ into the sewer next time," Odd threatened, and then turned to pout at me. "Was that entirely necessary?"

"Aww, poor widdle baby," I said, still giggling at the look on Odd's face when he surfaced from the sewer. His eyes had been wide with shock like he just couldn't believe I'd actually pushed him in (and he probably couldn't) and when he'd clawed his way out back onto dry land he just sat for a minute, dripping, while he tried to comprehend what had just happened. The rest of us had doubled over and laughed hysterically, tears running down our cheeks, at Odd's flustered expression. Twenty minutes later some of the residual funny was still being passed around the elevator and every few minutes someone would chuckle, leading to another outburst of hysterical laughter. Odd just crossed his arms and tried to look ticked off.

I wouldn't have pushed him in if we'd been walking alongside a waste-management tank or anything, but the sewer just held rainwater and the occasional dead rat. Odd really didn't even stink that much. His shoes, on the other hand, smelled like a dead cow even when they weren't wet. Now that they _were_ wet, they stank more with every squelching footstep that Odd took. The best part, though, was that all the hair gel he used had washed out and now he was walking around with the jankiest hairdo I'd ever seen—like someone had taken an acorn and stomped on it, then put it back on Odd's head.

Like he'd read my mind, Odd reached up and pulled the hair tie out of my hair and used it to pull back his sopping hair. "Thanks," he smiled at me. I just rolled my eyes and used the emergency spare hair tie I kept around my wrist.

The five of us descended into the scanner room, where we were just a quick virtualization away from Lyoko. I half expected Odd to come out on the other end with his janky hairdo still in place, but apparently it hadn't pervaded his subconscious yet because the computer still gave him his usual acorn 'do. He was, however, still a giant purple cat.

ZXCVBNM

Jeremie told us that the fifth sector, named "Carthage" by Franz Hopper, was at the edge of the forest sector, so we followed his directions and found ourselves standing at the edge of the digital sea, waiting for Jeremie to figure out how to actually get us there.

"It wants a password," he said, and I could hear his fingers clacking away as he tried several different passwords. "Carthage? The Carthaginians? Archibald the Nervous Dane?" He sighed in exasperation. "I don't know." I could almost see him pinching the bridge of his nose and trying to think of an answer. Then, "AHA! SCIPIO!" floated down from above, and all of a sudden this floating white orb appeared and scooped us all up.

"Your chariot awaits," Jeremie said sarcastically. Then everything went dark.

ZXCVBNM

The next thing I knew I was standing in the middle of a giant X.A.N.A.'s eye, surrounded by three slightly confused best friends and one very motion sick Odd. "I hate this place already," he groaned. "I didn't even know it was possible to get sick as a computer program."

"What are we supposed to be looking for?" Yumi asked, reaching out a hand to steady Odd as he was wobbling back and forth and looked prone to collapse at any second.

"Well," Jeremie's voice came back, "I don't really know. Just explore and see what you can find."

Everything in the room was made of metal, and it all looked intimidating. I was actually afraid to touch anything for fear of setting off some booby trap like Indiana Jones. Then again, Franz Hopper was the master of computer programming. Pretty much everything on Lyoko, from the trees in the forest sector to the ice in the polar region, was created just for show, so I doubted that giant boulders would come hurtling at me from nowhere just because I leaned against a wall.

On the other hand, this sector was supposed to be Lyoko's brain. Franz Hopper might have taken steps to ensure that it was safeguarded—and X.A.N.A. would do the same, if he knew about it.

"Does X.A.N.A. know about the fifth sector?" I asked Jeremie, who said "Hmmmmm," and began clacking away on his computer. Sometimes I thought that Jeremie would Google things that he didn't know the answer to, just to seem smarter to the rest of us.

"I think so," he said a minute later. "X.A.N.A. and Lyoko are so intertwined that I don't see how he could be here for so many years and not know that this place exists. So yes, he probably knows about Carthage, which means he probably has monsters to guard it."

Right on cue, somebody—I think it was Aelita—let out a shriek that could raise the dead. It was such an unearthly wail that it raised the hair on the back of my neck. I snatched my dagger out of my belt, a gesture that I was becoming much more acclimated to, and hurtled through the hallway into the next room, where Aelita was being attacked by a…thing.

"Does X.A.N.A. have a jellyfish monster?" I asked, while simultaneously trying to find a good position to attack the thing from. My little dagger wasn't going to do me much good, because the jellyfish was bigger than me and would probably kill me the second I went near it, which I would have to do if I was going to do any harm to it at all. I made a mental note to ask Jeremie to upgrade my weapons choices, maybe to something more practical. Like a decapitation hat.

"A what?" Jeremie asked me. "The computer says it's a Scyphozoa. Will somebody please kill it?"

"Well whatever it is, it's attacking your girlfriend," Ulrich said. Jeremie spluttered and probably turned thirteen shades of red. Yumi threw her fan through the air and severed one of the Scyphozoa's tentacles, which made the thing drop Aelita and float away. I was glad it had let go; even if we had managed to actually kill it, X.A.N.A. would have just regenerated another one to take its place.

"What was that thing?" Aelita was swaying quite dangerously on her feet and suddenly sat down with a plop on the floor.

"I think it wanted to steal your memories, but I don't know why," Jeremie said. "Maybe I haven't gotten that far in the diaries yet."

"Or," I pointed out, "Franz Hopper never wrote about it because X.A.N.A. created it to defeat us. Aelita is written into the codes of Lyoko; it probably went after her because she's connected to Franz Hopper. X.A.N.A. can probably use her to get out of Lyoko and into the internet."

_That _was a sobering thought. With X.A.N.A. free of his prison on Lyoko, there wasn't really anything we could do to fight him anymore. All of the bank documents, our health records, the government files, and the control of the military were linked to the internet. If X.A.N.A. wanted to take over the world that was certainly the way to do it.

ZXCVBNM

"So there's a dance coming up," Odd told me as we walked through the sewer back to school. "Are you going?"

I shrugged. "I didn't even know there was a dance coming up. I don't know; I might go." That was a lie because I absolutely did know that there was a dance coming up, and I was halfway hoping that Odd would ask me. I wasn't really against asking a boy to a dance, but the thing was that I wasn't sure how I felt about Odd. If he asked me, it meant he was definitely interested in me and gave me leave to act how I liked. If I asked _him_, it was a commitment. "Are you going?" I asked him, trying to help the conversation along in the direction I wanted it to go.

He nodded, deep in contemplation. "I think so. Emilie asked me. I'm just trying to make up my mind."

"EMILIE asked you?" I screeched, and the happy fuzzies of the last few moments exploded in a fireball. "Emilie de Luc? We are talking about the same Emilie, right?"

"Yes?" He was confused. "Is that bad?"

"No." I flapped my hand and tried to pretend like it wasn't a big deal even though it _was_. Emilie was persistent, but she was also a maneater. Odd didn't stand a chance. "I need to head home," I said, and stalked toward the gate with all the speed of a cheetah. Something made me change my mind, though, and I turned around and stalked right back toward Odd because I just couldn't bear the thought of him dating Emilie. "The thing about Emilie is that she will suck out your soul and leave you as a lifeless husk. She's like a drug. If you date her you'll never be happy again. Watch your back."

"It's a date to a dance, not a marriage proposal!" He shot back, eyebrows creased.

"She's like heroin. One hit is all it takes. I'll see you on Monday."

ZXCVBNM

"You're jealous," Lydia said, when I related to her the tales of my adventures for the afternoon (sans X.A.N.A., of course).

"I am _not_ jealous." I said it flatly, hoping that a monotone tone of voice would disguise how I really felt. The truth was that I was just the tiniest bit jealous because I did sort of like Odd. Romantic feelings aside, I was really just concerned for him.

"You are. You're at least a little bit jealous." She put her left blinker on, checked the rearview mirror, and merged into traffic. "Jealousy is healthy. You'd be weird if you_ weren't_ jealous."

"I'm not jealous!" I said. "I'm just worried. You know what Emilie is like."

Lydia laughed, but it was a hollow laugh. "I know. I'll never forgive her for what she did to Jake."

ZXCVBNM

"I don't understand what she was so upset about," Odd said as he plopped down on his bed. Ulrich smirked and rolled onto his back so that he was staring at the ceiling, then turned his head to face Odd.

"You really don't know? Or you just want to pretend like you don't know?" He asked.

Odd shrugged. "I really don't know. And," he continued, "I would be most obliged if you would enlighten me."

"Well." Ulrich sat up and leaned his back against the wall. "First, Parker likes you. Second, she and Emilie used to be best friends and you don't date your best friend's ex. Ever. Third, Parker hates Emilie because Emilie pretty much destroyed Parker's brother Jake. Where _were_ you when all this was going on?"

ZXCVBNM

Enjoy! I'm sorry it's taken me so monumentally long to post (again). I can't promise regular updates, but I can promise that I haven't forgotten about you. Happy holidays!


	10. In Which Ulrich Says a Wordy Dird

A/N: My goal is to have this posted by Christmas Eve. Depending on my exams and how they turn out, I may or may not make that goal. We'll see. You won't really know, since you won't be reading this until I post and it may or may not be WAY past Christmas when that happens, so I'm really just writing it to motivate myself. GO MOTIVATION!

ZXCVBNM

In Which Ulrich Says A Wordy Dird

Lydia was right; I would _never_ forgive Emilie de Luc for what she did to Jake.

Emilie and I had been best friends since the second grade. That was true. What I neglected to tell you earlier in this little shindig was that Emilie and Jake started dating at the beginning of my freshman year of high school. I hadn't been lying when I told Odd that she was like heroin—one hit was all it took before Jake was hooked. Bad.

I also hadn't been lying when I told you that she was a maneater. She literally went through a boy every week or two, and so we all figured that Jake was just another blip on her dating list, until she stayed with him. And stayed with him. They were together for a whopping eight months before things went south, so we all figured that she had changed her ways and stopped being a serial dater. They'd been deliriously happy for so long that no one expected her to show up one night in tears, break things off with him, and confess that she'd been with someone else.

Jake was never the same. It was like she tore his heart out and put it in a blender.

ZXCVBNM

"They dated for about eight months—you didn't know that?" Ulrich frowned at Odd. "It was kind of a weird relationship. They were a weird pair. You really didn't know?" When Odd shook his head, Ulrich continued. "The whole school was talking about it, especially when they broke up."

Odd shrugged. "I had no idea they ever dated," He said. "And their breakup can't have been _that _bad—"

Ulrich shook his head. "Jake tried to kill himself when Emilie broke up with him. Ms. Hertz found him one day after class with one of his wrists slit in the bathroom. His dog was whining and howling; that's the only reason anyone even went to look for him."

"Are you _serious?"_ Odd spluttered and sat straight up, cross-legged, on his bed. "I mean that's bad, but how is that Emilie's fault? If Jake decided he wanted to just die, why are you blaming that on another person? That seems like faulty reasoning to me. And how do you know all this?"

Ulrich shrugged. "It's not really all that hard to tell that something is going on between Emilie and Parker. If you watch her for half a second you'll catch them making eye contact and then looking away like it never happened. And anyone with a pair of eyes could have seen what was going on between Emilie and Jake. As for blaming Emilie—if it had been a normal relationship, I wouldn't blame Emilie," Ulrich said. "The thing was that Emilie convinced Jake that he couldn't live without her, and then once she got him convinced that he couldn't be alone, she cheated on him."

"She did WHAT? With WHO? That makes me really angry!" Odd wasn't just angry at Emilie for being so evil, but he was angry at her for cheating on Parker's brother. He'd had personal experience with a cheater. It wasn't fun.

Ulrich just rolled his eyes, because he didn't know the entirety of Odd's dating history or The Cheater Saga. "Odd, you've dated half the student body. You shouldn't be getting mad."

"Yeah, but I haven't _cheated_ on any of them! Who was it?"

"Well," Ulrich said, "nobody knows."

ZXCVBNM

When I was really angry (or emotional) I liked to get the stand mixer down from the shelves that served as our pantry and bake something. It didn't really matter what, but my favorites were chocolate chip cookies. I was a girl, after all, and susceptible to chocolate like Superman was susceptible to Kryptonite. Since we didn't have any chocolate chips, I settled for sugar cookies, which were my second favorite.

They were even better in dough form, especially when I got to eat the whole bowl all at once without anyone judging me. Which I did, plopping down in front of the TV and watching one of the American TV shows my dad was always getting on DVD so that we could keep up with our verbal English (which wasn't such a bad idea—we lived in France, after all, so all we ever spoke was French. Sometimes I forgot that I really _was_ an American).

TV worked for a while, but once I got to the end of the second episode I decided that I just couldn't sit on my butt and eat cookie dough anymore. I got up and tried to clean my room, but I kept it pretty neat so after ten minutes there wasn't anything left to do except steam-clean the carpet and put my drapes in the washing machine, and I wasn't about to bust out the steam cleaner. It was too early to start cooking dinner, and I couldn't drive yet so there weren't any errands I could run. I took what I thought was a long shower, but when I got out and looked at the clock I'd only managed to keep myself occupied for thirty minutes. Eventually I just started wandering around the house putting things away.

Lydia came back by the house as I was making another sweep through the kitchen. "What are you doing?" She asked me as I tidied up the pantry (for the third time).

I shrugged. "I've got nothing to do."

Lydia, bless her soul, took one look at me and knew what was wrong. "Get your coat," she said. "We're going out to dinner."

ZXCVBNM

"When did all this happen?" Odd asked, running his fingers through his hair (which was now washed and hanging past his shoulders, to the admiration of a couple of the freshman girls who haunted the halls of the boy's dorm during Shower Time). He jerked the towel off his waist, causing a startled screech from Ulrich at the sudden sight of nudity.

"Dude! Have some modesty!" Ulrich clapped a hand over his eyes and turned to face the wall. "Gross. Italians have no morals."

Odd just laughed. "That's not fair! You can't classify the citizens of an entire country based on the actions of one person. Italians are _very_ modest. But I have some German in me, and that's where the immodesty comes from."

"Whatever." Ulrich, being German, shrugged off Odd's barbed comments. "Jake and Emilie. They started dating in August of last year, but I think they'd known each other—or at least known _of_ each other, for a while. The first time I remember seeing Emilie and Parker together was in the second grade."

Odd whistled. "Wow."

"Yep. I don't think anyone ever expected them to date. They were kind of a weird couple. It was even weirder when Emilie stuck with him for a solid eight months." Ulrich turned on the TV and the game system and tossed Odd a controller. "What game do you want to play?"

"I think I feel like slaying you in Modern Warfare again," Odd answered. "Why was it so weird that Emilie and Jake dated for so long?"

"Do you not have eyes?" Ulrich shook his head. "Emilie used to be with a different guy every week, or just about. She and Parker were totally boy crazy, but Emilie was the only one who would ever actually chase anyone down and kiss them. She got me behind the bleachers our seventh grade year," he added ruefully. "But she was with Jake for eight months solid, until one day they just…weren't together anymore. The rumor I heard was that she cheated on him, but no one knows who with. A couple people tried to get it out of Jake, but he wouldn't talk, and neither would she. And since then… nothing. I don't think she's dated _anyone_."

"Eight months from August…" Odd paused the game because he couldn't run two joysticks, annihilate Ulrich, and do simple math all at once. "That would be May, right?"

"Right," Ulrich said, and couldn't help noticing that Odd looked just a trifle pale.

ZXCVBNM

Lydia, true to style, had realized that something monumental was going on and had brought support in the form of Mason, who now sat at the counter of Luigi's with us, chomping down on garlic bread.

"I might feel better if I could find out _who_ the bleepity bleeping bleeper is so I could beat him to death and take my anger out on him, but I'm not asking Emilie and Jake isn't talking. I don't even know if he knows who it is," I said.

Mason shook his head. "'e knows," he said around a mouthful of pizza. He swallowed, then continued, "But he won't tell anyone."

"Do _you_ know who it is?" Lydia asked, but Mason shook his head again. "But we aren't here about Jake and Emilie," She said, and fixed me with a stare that would have turned lesser people to stone. "We're here because you like Odd and won't do anything about it."

"Dating is hard for me!" I whined, and hoped that she would leave it at that.

"Bull crap," she said. "You're smart. You're funny. I would kill to have green eyes or red hair, or any hair that isn't pink," she said. "And—"

"Your hair is pink?" Mason, startled, grabbed her head and parted her hair so he could stare at her roots. "Well gosh darn it, it is."

"It's genetics," Lydia and I answered in unison. "The point is," Lydia continued, turning to me, "that you have a crush the size of a house on Odd, and now you're going to let him get caught by another girl instead of fighting for it."

"He's not just going to get caught, he's going to get his soul sucked out," I said. "Emilie is maneater. I tried to warn him, but he wouldn't listen."

"She's a what?" Jake elbowed his way up to our table, followed by Dan, who raised his eyebrows at me and motioned to Luigi for two slices of pepperoni pizza. "I don't know if that's true."

"What are you doing here?" I asked him, glaring at Lydia.

She raised her hands in defense. "Don't look at me—I didn't call him."

"I did," Mason said. "If we're going to talk about Emilie, I figured Jake was the only one who could clear this—" he flapped his hand at me on the word 'this', encompassing everything I was currently going through— "could clear all this up."

Jake grabbed the barstool and deposited himself neatly on top. That kid never ceased to amaze me. If I'd been blind I would have been stumbling all over myself and tripping over everything in my path, but Jake just smoothly navigated through the crowded room and sat down with no trouble at all. Sometimes I doubted that he was really even blind, and that one day he'd just pull off his sunglasses and stare at us with perfect vision and say, "surprise! I really _can_ see!"

"Emilie isn't a maneater," Jake said, bringing me hurtling back to the real world. "She shouldn't have cheated, but that doesn't make her a maneater."

"But she goes through a different guy every week!" I said. "Jake. I don't want to hurt you, but I think maybe you're remembering Emilie different than she really is. Was. You dated her, and those were the best of times, and now you're imagining her to be some cute little idyllic woman when really she's… just a maneater," I finished lamely, and shrugged.

"No, I'm not," he said calmly. "Just because I'm blind doesn't mean I don't hear things. Before we were dating, sure. Every week she was with a different guy. Now that we've been broken up—nothing. I don't think she's dated anybody since May."

ZXCVBNM

"Are you okay?" Ulrich asked Odd.

"I think so." Odd's voice wavered just the tiniest bit, giving him away. Ulrich grabbed the trash can from beside the door and thrust it in front of Odd. "Put your head between your knees if you feel like you're going to pass out. And don't hurl on me. What's wrong?"

Odd just shook his head and bent over, taking several deep gulps of air before resurfacing. "Um," he said.

"Um?" Ulrich raised his eyebrows. "Here, take this," he said, handing Odd a water bottle from the contraband mini-fridge that he kept hidden in his wardrobe. "Are you sick?"

"I'm not sick." Odd said. "I mean, I might get sick, but there's nothing wrong with me. But I think I maybe have done a very, very bad thing."

"What could you have—Oh shitake mushrooms," Ulrich said. "You didn't."

"I think I did," Odd said.

ZXCVBNM

"…and that's what happened," Jake said. "Do you see why I didn't want to tell you before?"

"Well, yeah," I said, picking my jaw up off the floor and forcing my tongue to work again. "Odd? And _EMILIE?_" I was so angry that I could hear the blood thumping in my ears and feel the vein in my temple throbbing. I was _furious_. I had never been so angry in my entire life.

"'fraid so," Jake said. "I don't know… I don't know whose fault it was, or if it even was anyone's fault, or if it had been going on for a while, or if it was a one time thing, or what. I didn't want to know. I didn't stick around to find out. I felt like she had ripped my heart out of my chest and then put it in a blender." He might have been speaking in a controlled tone of voice, but his clenched fists gave him away. "It just… it makes me so angry!" He pounded the countertop hard enough to make my silverware leap off of my plate. "Sorry," he said a second later, as he wiped his eyes. "This is…"

"It's tough to talk about." Dan patted Jake sympathetically on the back. "Are you ready to go home?"

While the boys gathered their coats and headed towards the door, I snagged Lydia by the sleeve. "Can you take me by the school?" I asked. "It appears I have something to deal with."

ZXCVBNM

The next thing I knew, I was pounding on Odd's door. It was only eleven at night but their light was off, which led me to believe that they were either in Jeremie's room or sound asleep. The latter proved to be true when a very groggy Ulrich cracked open their door.

"Where's Odd?" I demanded brusquely. "I need to talk to him."

I heard muffled cursing going on in the background, and rustling as Odd put on his clothes, but then he stepped out into the hallway. "I know what you're here for, and we aren't going to discuss it in the dorm," he said firmly. "Come outside with me."

I held in my rage until we were safely outside, but once we were in the woods I let go. "You BASTARD!" I screeched at him. "What were you thinking?"

"I—"

"How could you do that to my brother? How could you do that to _me?"_

"But—"

"Jake tried to kill himself, did you ever think about that?"

"Will you—"

"Have you ever had to stand in the hospital with someone that you love and watch them almost bleed to death?"

"Parker—"

"How long had you and Emilie been seeing each other?"

"If you'd let me talk I'll explain it to you!"

"Go to hell!" I might have said some other things, too, but they weren't very nice and they definitely aren't suitable for polite company. I'll leave the cussing up to your imagination. What I won't leave to your imagination is how as I told him to go to H-E-double-hockey-sticks, my fist connected with the side of his face.

"Did you just punch me?"

"So what if I did?" I shot back.

"Parker." Odd fixed me with a stare that quenched the fire in my blood. "I hooked up with Emilie but I swear I had no idea that she was dating your brother!"

"Bull crap!" I said, and just like that the fire roared back into life. "You're like Emilie, you just date one girl after another. I bet she was just one more on your list! Ugh!"

Odd had told me (jokingly, of course) that his goal was to date every girl in our class by the time he graduated from high school. I shocked myself just a little bit by twisting something personal he had told me and throwing it back at him, but so what? I was MAD. I wanted revenge. I wanted to watch Odd writhe in agony, like a slug covered in salt.

"_NO_," he said, grabbing my wrist. "She was not on my list. I don't even _have _a list. Do you even know me? Have I dated anyone since I met you?"

I didn't want to think about the implications of what he'd just said, so I didn't. "I don't care what you've done since we met. I care about what you did to my brother!"

"I didn't know she was dating anyone." He said it so softly and intensely that it tied my stomach in knots. "If I had known, I wouldn't have kissed her."

"Did you only kiss her?" I gave him a scrutinizing glare, but he just shrugged.

"I'm a boy, not a monk. Look," he said, catching my wrist again when I tried to walk away, "I've been cheated on before. I know exactly how it feels. It's like…" He sucked in air while he tried to think. "It's like someone has ripped your heart out of your chest and put it in a blender." His words, so eerily similar to Jake's, struck a chord with me. I wrenched my hand away because I couldn't bear the thought of being touched by Odd, but I did sit down on the ground at his feet.

"I think," I said, "that you need to tell me exactly what happened."

"Well, okay," he said. "But to tell you about Emilie, first I have to tell you about Sam."

He and Sam had met in the eighth grade, although he didn't say how. He did say that she went to a different school, so meeting with each other was difficult. But Odd had never been a great one for the rules, so he snuck out of his dorm a couple times a week to hang out with her on campus.

"We started dating a few months before your brother and Emilie did," he said. "And it lasted until the night that Emilie and I…" he trailed off and swallowed.

"Hm. So did she break up with you because she found out you cheated on her?" I asked, surprised at how nasty I was being tonight. The thing was, with my mom gone, I felt like someone had to get all mama bear in defense of my brothers. As the only girl in the family, that responsibility fell to me. Plus, Odd had really, _really_ pissed me off.

"No," he said calmly. "I broke up with her because I found out she'd been seeing someone else for months."

Odd knew that they were only in high school, so the chances of his relationship with Sam making it all the way to marriage were slim to none. What he hadn't expected was the slap in the face of seeing her kissing another boy in pictures on Facebook. Sam had seen them too, but had no explanation. So he'd broken up with her.

He'd gone down to the soccer fields to be alone, since he didn't want Ulrich prying into his business. "Sam was… she was really special to me," he said. "And Ulrich is my best friend, but I really didn't want him to see me crying like a baby. So I went down under the bleachers and let it out."

Emilie had stumbled upon him there, teary-eyed and wiping snot off of his face. She had produced a tissue from somewhere (her bra, I thought acerbically—that's where she always kept them),then given him a bottle of water out of the footlocker of a purse that she was always carrying around.

"She wanted to know what was going on," he said. "So I told her."

There had been more tears, more snot, and more tissues, but in the end he wound up with his head in her lap while she rubbed his temples and tried to get him to calm down. And as they'd been staring into each others' eyes, and it was a full moon in the spring, and there was already so much tension in the air…

"It just happened," he said with a shrug. "And one thing led to another, and…"

They stopped before anything worse than a little second base could happen. Emilie smiled at him, straightened her clothes, and walked away. Odd drank the rest of his water and returned to his room, where he went to sleep.

"I hadn't even talked to her since that day, until she asked me to Prom. And I swear, Parker, I promise. If I had known she was dating your brother then I wouldn't have even talked to her. I know what it feels like to have your heart broken. I am so, so sorry that I was a part of that for your brother. I wish I could change it." He shuddered. "It makes me sick that I thought she was helping me get over one cheater, when really she was just creating another. She made _me_ the cheater. She knew I'd just had my heart broken and she led me to break someone else's heart. It makes me sick." He might have thought he looked like he was only rubbing his face, but I had five brothers. I knew what it looked like when a guy was trying not to let you see him crying.

"I believe you," I said softly. "And I'm sorry for yelling at you earlier."

He laughed. "It's okay. If you'd done the same thing to one of my sisters, you would have gotten it from me, too."

ZXCVBNM

There was only one thing left for me to do. I believed Odd wholeheartedly. He was my best friend, so I believed him like I believed the sun would rise in the morning. But that didn't mean I wasn't going to call Emilie and get her side of the story.

It wasn't that I didn't believe Odd, it was that I wondered what on earth could have caused Emilie to choose not to tell Odd that she was dating someone, and had been for a while! She'd seemed so devoted to Jake. So what went wrong? I knew it wasn't any of my business but I picked up the phone and dialed her number anyways.

It rang a couple times before she picked up. "Hello?" she croaked, and I remembered that it was past midnight. I even felt bad for just a second. Then I remembered what she'd done and didn't care if I'd woken her up, even if it was in the middle of the night.

"I want to know what happened between you and Odd," I said bluntly.

"Well if you know it was Odd, that means you've already talked to him, because you haven't heard it from _me_ and Jake won't talk. Why don't you just ask him what happened?" She snapped.

"I already know what happened," I snapped back. "It's more like this: what on earth made you decide to not tell Odd that you were dating someone?"

She paused, then sighed. "It just happened," she said simply. "I just wanted to make Odd feel better because he's always so funny, but that night he was so upset… it wasn't right. I just wanted to be a friend. And then…" I knew Emilie so well, even after seven months apart, that I could almost see her shrug. "It just happened."

"Bull hockey!" I said crossly. "Things don't just _happen_. No one forced you to kiss Odd or to play your stupid little games with him. You _chose_ not to tell him about Jake. He tried to kill himself, did you even know that?"

"Of course I knew!" She screeched. "And I felt terrible. I tried to go see him when he was in the hospital but you guys had PNGed me so I couldn't even get in. They turned me away at the desk." She sighed again. "I wanted to explain what had happened, but none of you would even listen to me." She paused again; I waited for her to go on, as much because I wanted to hear what was coming next as I wanted to imagine her squirming in the silence. "I really did care about Jake. And about Odd, but not in the same way that I cared about your brother. Things were…different with him. Jake, I mean. And I just… It hurts me, seeing someone who is usually so vibrant reduced to snot and tears underneath the soccer bleachers. I really only wanted to help Odd."

"By destroying my brother?" I didn't mean to snap, but I did. Emilie made me _really_ angry.

"I never meant to hurt your brother," she said. "I promise you."

"Oh. So instead of just destroying my brother, you decided to nearly kill him and then do the same thing to Odd!"

"Odd knows what happened!" She said. "People might talk, but he's the only one who isn't going to call me a lying cheater. So yes, I asked him to Prom because otherwise I'll spend the rest of high school just sitting, alone, biding my time and doing my penance, until I can graduate and go somewhere where I'm not automatically labeled a cheater and a maneater. How did you put it? That I 'suck out souls' or something?"

"That's what it looked like to me!" I said defensively, and raised my hands even though she couldn't see me.

"Appearances can be misleading." She said bluntly. "If Jake wants to hear from me, tell him that I wish him happiness."

ZXCVBNM

"I've been such a fool," I said the next morning, as Lydia and I were once again seated atop the counters eating breakfast. The rest of the boys were creating such a ruckus that I didn't think there was any danger of us being overheard, but I lowered my voice anyways. "I talked to Odd yesterday. And to Emilie. And they both told me the same story."

"What was that?" Lydia asked, her words muffled by a massive bite of biscuit.

"That it just…happened." I shrugged, much in the same way that Odd had. "And Odd said he had no idea that Emilie was dating anyone."

"Do you believe him?" Lydia asked me.

I nodded. "I believe both of them. Odd has never lied to me, and he's my best friend. And Emilie… she said the same thing that Odd said, so even if I'm still furious at her, her story matches his. I honestly believe that it was an accident."

"So you're going to let Emilie and Odd go to Prom together with your blessing?" She asked.

I shook my head. "I haven't made up my mind yet. I don't know what to think. I know now that she isn't going to suck out his soul or anything, but I'm still…"

"Jealous?" Lydia finished my sentence and raised her eyebrows at me.

And, for the first time, I realized just how incredibly jealous I was. "Jealous," I agreed. I ate the rest of my biscuit in one bite, then hopped off the counter. "Can you take me by Kadic again? I think I have something else to do."

ZXCVBNM

I stood outside Odd's door for at least five minutes, heart pounding and fingers trembling, as I tried to decide whether I really wanted to pour my heart out to him. I really did like Odd. I really didn't want him to go to Prom with Emilie. What I didn't know was whether I wanted to date him.

I could hear the others inside, laughing and cackling at something Odd had said. That was definitely one of the things that I liked about him; the boy could make a fire hydrant laugh. There were a whole host of other things I liked, but they weren't things I could just put my finger on. All of them were so tiny, so much a part of his character, that it was impossible to separate one trait from all the traits that made Odd Odd. I just knew I liked him, and that was enough for me. So, I squared my shoulder and decided that now was as good a time as any.

I had just raised my hand to knock on the door when it sung open, and all five of them came tumbling out. "What are you doing here?" Aelita demanded. She might have thought I missed the significant look she cast between Odd and me, but I didn't. "And why in the world did you punch Odd in the face?"

"I really am sorry," I said, and meant it. I felt terrible. I hadn't realized I'd socked him quite so hard until I was standing face to face with him, but apparently I had really walloped him. He had two black eyes and looked like he'd gotten into a bar fight with The Incredible Hulk.

"It's really okay," he said, and once again I believed him. "We were just going to get some coffee. Want to come?"

"Yes, please," I said. With the other four around I wasn't going to get a chance to talk to Odd anytime soon. "I've been craving one of those oatmeal raisin cookies for weeks."

"Well then, let's go."

We took off in the direction of the coffee shop, but Jeremie and Aelita got distracted by a new computer place being opened and decided to meet up with us later. "Techno nerds," I muttered under my breath. "I guess they're a cute couple, though."

"Mmmm." Odd grunted in agreement. "If they'd just do anything about it, they would be a cute couple."

"Well, maybe Jeremie will get brave one of these days and do something so romantic that it sweeps Aelita off her feet," I countered.

"Do you even know Jeremie?" Odd rolled his eyes. "It's been enough of a fight to get him to ask her to Prom, and he's still going back and forth."

"Speaking of Prom…" I cleared my throat, clenched my fists, and almost backed down before I just went for it. "Do you maybe want to go with me?"

Odd smiled. "I would be honored to go as friends to Prom with you," he said, and did this ridiculous little flourished half-bow like I was a princess and he was one of my suitors.

"Good. As long as you don't wear purple, it's a date."

"Do you even know me? Of _course _I'll be wearing purple," he said. "With kitty ears. And maybe a tail."

_Do you even know me? Have I dated anyone since I met you?_

Odd's words came back to me in a rush, and without even thinking about it, I blurted out, "What did you mean last night? When you asked me if I'd realized that you hadn't dated anyone since we met?"

"Oh." Odd cleared his throat and wouldn't meet my eyes. "Well. No, go on ahead, we'll catch up!" He shouted to Yumi and Ulrich, who were staring at us with such deep speculation that it made me quite uncomfortable. "It's like this. I like you. I want to go to Prom with you. But I don't think I need to date anyone right now."

"How does that work?" I asked. "I get that you want to go to Prom with me if you like me. But if you like me, why won't you date me?"

"Don't take what I'm about to say the wrong way, okay?" he said. "Because I don't mean it how it sounds." He gave an explosive sigh, then said, "Sam was really special to me."

"Do you still like her?" I asked.

He shook his head. "That's not what I meant. Just listen. I'm not heartbroken anymore, and I don't want to go crawling to her and beg her to take me back anymore, and I'm not even really attracted to her anymore."

"That doesn't explain anything," I said. "If—"

"Let me finish. I think that until I can give you all of my heart, I don't need to give you any of it. Does that make sense?"

Red-faced, I nodded, and was very glad that Odd had gotten around to telling me that he wouldn't date me before I got around to pouring out my heart to him.

"Nothing's changed, though," he said. "You're still my best friend. So let's go get coffee and pretend like we didn't just have a DTR with Ulrich and Yumi staring at us."

"They were staring at us?" I whirled in a circle, trying to find the two sneaky spies so I could plot my revenge, but they were nowhere to be found.

"No," Odd laughed. "But I made you look, didn't I?"

ZXCVBNM

"Mr. Man has some maturity for someone so young. Maybe I shouldn't have failed him last year," my dad said. We were sitting at the dinner table, and all of my brothers, plus Lydia, were trying to give me advice.

"Yeah, well, it's just weird, isn't it?" I asked. "I pretty much told him how I felt without telling him how I felt, and then I got shot down. What do I do now?"

"Look, maturity is important," Eric said. "You probably can't see it now because you're so young, but one of these days you're going to look back at that moment and commend Odd for his braverism. The kid's right. If he's still hung up on Sam, you don't want him dating _you_."

"What if he accidentally called you Sam? That would be _weird_," Mason put in. "I wish more guys were like him. Too many of us try to pretend like we aren't still halfway in love with our exes by dating someone new, and then everyone gets their hearts broken."

"Just wait until the timing is right," Lydia said. "It's true that good things come to those who wait. If you like him, stick around. The universe has a freaky way of working things out."

It was true; I knew the story of how she and Eric got together. Lydia had pretty much brought him her heart on a platter, but he had rejected her. Now, of course, they were a cute little family, but for a while there things looked pretty rough. "I know it does," I said. "Mostly I'm concerned about how I'm going to face him at school on Monday."

"Act the same way you always have," Dan said. "Just because he shot you down doesn't mean he doesn't still like you as a friend."

"Things are probably going to be awkward at first," Eric added. "But you'll get over it. After a while you won't notice that anything's changed."

"I believe you," I grumbled. "But I don't like it."

To be continued… with 1000% more X.A.N.A. (and maybe a little Yumi/Ulrich flirting!)

ZXCVBNM

Okay so I really am probably not going to post again before the middle of December, as I am a college student and have nothing better to do with my life than three research papers and two final projects on top of all my exams. I haven't forgotten about you. Please harass me all you want so I update. But I am still alive!


	11. In Which Odd Kisses Me On The Lips!

**December**

By the time I found myself at the end of term, I had decided that this whole going-as-friends-to-prom thing maybe wasn't such a bad idea after all. Odd was right. I didn't want him to date me if he was still hung up on Sam. That didn't mean that I didn't want to hunt her down and sock her in the face like I'd punched Odd (his black eyes went away, finally, and only after the entire school made guesses as to who he had gotten into a fight with) or that I hadn't hunted for hours for a killer dress to wear—one that hopefully would make Odd just a little bit weak in the knees.

There were two days left until the dance, and the entire school was abuzz with excitement. Yumi and Ulrich had decided to go together, also as friends, but we all knew that it wasn't really just "as friends". I forgave them; they were shy, and I knew how hard it was to walk up to the person that you liked and pour out your heart to them (see aforementioned Odd Fiasco). It was especially intimidating when your beloved was a tall Japanese ninja who was a grade ahead of you, but I digress.

Aelita and Jeremie hadn't even discussed the dance even though Jeremie had promised Odd and Ulrich that he'd ask Aelita to go with him. So far, nothing. Odd and I had secretly decided that if there was no progress by lunch time, we were going to lock them in a janitor's closet and refuse to let them out until they agreed to go together. ZXCVBNM

"Asked your girlfriend to the Prom yet, Belpois?" Mr. Nichols asked as we sauntered into Psychology after lunch. There was a blizzard going on outside, so instead of heading out to the soccer fields to sit and talk we Lyokians had all sat down outside Mr. Nichols' door, where the conversation ranged over a variety of topics from Prom to X.A.N.A to William Dunbar, the new guy who had transferred in a few days ago.

Jeremie turned thirteen shades of red and bent down to tie his shoe, so that when he straightened up he had an excuse for a red face. I rolled my eyes at him. Jeremie had a number of evasive maneuvers, but I knew them all. He wasn't getting away this time.

I looked at Odd, who gave just the tiniest nod of assent, before I looked back at Mr. Nichols with a wicked grin on my face.

"Actually, no, he hasn't," I said, neatly dodging Jeremie's elbow as he tried to hit me in the ribs (that was another evasive maneuver). "He promised us he'd ask Aelita like a month ago, and he hasn't done anything about it. I think it's time for a little blackmail."

"I can't blackmail students! I'm a teacher!" Mr. Nichols threw his hands up in the air and gave me a what-are-you-thinking eyeroll. "But," he said, this time holding up a finger and waggling it in Jeremie's face, "I have it on good authority that Miss Stones would like a date to the prom, and as you happen to be in the market, I'd suggest asking her, Belpois." He raised his eyebrows at Jeremie, then turned on his heel and headed for his desk, where he propped his feet up and turned on the sports channel. "Oh," he added, once he got situated, "We have a test on Friday. Better start crack-a-lackin!"

We all groaned and dutifully flipped open our textbooks so that we could "study". Odd, by this point, didn't even pretend to study, but whipped out a pad of paper and some fancy-pants art pencils and started drawing.

A few seconds later, Jeremie's laptop started beeping from his backpack. I knew the sound that a X.A.N.A. attack made when Lyoko alerted Jeremie, but this one was different. Odd looked at me, eyebrows raised, with an expression on his face that let me know that he had no idea what it meant, either. Jeremie, on the other hand, must have known exactly what it meant, because he turned about the same shade of white as a piece of computer paper.

"Belpois! What have I told you about having that infernal machine in my classroom?" Mr. Nichols barked, jumping to his feet and zooming across the room like he was on roller skates. Jeremie was quicker on the uptake and had already silenced his computer and shut it down, but he was stuffing it into his backpack with such speed that I knew something was really wrong.

"I'm sorry, sir," Jeremie said. "My grandmother is sick, and I told my parents to Skype if she got worse. I think they were trying to call me. Can I go see what it was about?" He asked. He even managed to bust out the lip quiver and a few crocodile tears.

"I'll walk him to the pay phone," Odd volunteered, bouncing up out of his seat, drawing forgotten for the moment.

"I'll go too," I volunteered, and glared at Mr. Nichols, daring him to tell me I couldn't go.

Mr. Nichols stared at the three of us like he couldn't decide whether we were being honest or not. We were all pretty honest kids and had excellent track records, which I thought had to count for something, considering we weren't the kind of people to skip class to spray-paint graffiti on the soccer fields (well, Odd might have been, but Jeremie and I weren't). I hoped the fact that Odd was with us wouldn't make us guilty by association; I liked the boy fine, but sometimes I wished he hadn't decided that it was a good idea to spray-paint Jim's face on the wall of the school. He was forever a suspect in any graffiti that showed up, even though he hadn't touched a can of spray-paint since he was in the seventh grade.

"Well, fine," Mr. Nichols conceded a minute later. "But no monkey business! And no spray-paint! If Jim's face shows up on the side of the building again I'll know who to suspect!" He called after us as we retreated down the hall, still "supporting" a "distraught" Jeremie.

"What's going on?" I asked as we rounded the corner. "That didn't sound like a normal X.A.N.A. alert."

"Well, that's because it wasn't," Jeremie said. "Go grab the others. I think we need to have a meeting right now. I'll meet you in my dorm in ten minutes."

ZXCVBNM

Aelita and Yumi turned up quickly after Odd and I texted them, but there was still no sign of Ulrich. A quick check of Odd's dorm revealed no Ulrich, but it did reveal that he (Ulrich, I mean) had left his phone plugged in to the wall when he went to class that morning. "Plan B," Odd muttered, sliding his finger down the schedule that the boys kept tacked to the door. "Fifth period. He's with Jim right now."

"Oh goody," I said. "We'll never get him out of there."

"That's not true," Yumi said. "I know just what to do. I'll be back in five minutes." She took off running down the hall, slid down the banister of the stairs, and sprinted out the door.

"Do you think she knows what to do?" Odd asked me, watching as Yumi disappeared into the trees behind the soccer fields.

"She knows what to do. The girl knocked Nurse Dorothy out with a bedpan to get me out of the infirmary. If anyone can bust Ulrich out of gym, it's Yumi."

True to her word, Yumi and Ulrich reappeared five minutes later. "Told you," she said smartly, sliding down the wall to sit with her knees up beside Jeremie's computer desk.

"What did you do?" Odd asked her, clearly beginning to think suspect that Yumi really was a ninja.

She shrugged. "It wasn't that hard. They were doing push-ups by the wall. I grabbed Ulrich and took off. I don't think Jim will even miss him."

"What's going on, Einstein?" Ulrich asked Jeremie, who was conferring with Aelita and noisily clacking away on his keyboard.

"Huh? Oh," Jeremie said, swiveling in his chair so that he could face us. "We're being watched."

ZXCVBNM

"We're being watched by _who?_" Yumi demanded, craning her neck to see what Jeremie was typing. It wouldn't have mattered—it was in come computer language, so only he and Aelita could read it.

"We're not sure," Aelita said. "It looks like it could be somebody from the government, but we can't really tell. Their encryption is really good."

"Can you break it?" Odd asked. "Then we'd know who the sneaky tattletale is, and we could give him—her—it—them! Give them a piece of our mind!" He thrust his fist into the air like he was going to punch the hacker in the face and growled.

"The thing is that whoever is watching us doesn't know who _we_ are. I guess I should have said that someone is watching Lyoko. That's what made the alarm go off—there was a presence on Lyoko, just not X.A.N.A.'s presence. It's really weird."

"Do you think maybe it's those guys from the government who went after your parents?" I asked Aelita.

She nodded. "It's definitely a possibility. But I don't know why they'd want to keep an eye on Lyoko."

"Maybe it's because they think your father's returned from wherever he is hiding, and they want to make sure before they come kidnap him," Jeremie pointed out.

THAT was a sobering thought. If whoever was on the other end of that encryption thought that we were Franz Hopper, all of us stood a very great chance of meeting the same fate that Aelita's mom had met.

"If whoever it was ever found out who we were, do you think they'd come after us and kidnap us? Even though we aren't Franz Hopper?" I asked.

Jeremie shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know if they were after Hopper because of some special talent he had; the man was certainly a genius, although I can't imagine the government coming after someone simply to force them to work. I guess I don't know everything about the government, though."

"They wanted Hopper to shut down Lyoko, right?" Ulrich asked. "So if it's up and running again, they probably want whoever is running it to shut it down."

"Which means they'll probably come after us until we do shut it down, and we can't, because then both Franz Hopper and Aelita will die, right?" Yumi asked. When Jeremie nodded, she continued, "So how do we keep them from finding out who we are?"

Jeremie shook his head. "I have no idea. I don't know how to hack into their system and get their information without letting them know who I am, at least."

"Well, we can't sacrifice you because no one else knows how to run the program except Aelita, and she has to be _on_ Lyoko. What if one of us did it?" I asked. "I'm not afraid."

"You're not afraid because you don't know what you're dealing with," Aelita shot back. There was a moment of stunned silence as we stared dumbfounded at Aelita, who, to our knowledge, had never spoken a harsh word in her life. She sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you. But if it's the government on the other end of that encryption, then it's the same people who came after my parents. And if they think that _you_ are the one running Lyoko, they'll kill you. If they don't do worse things to you."

"Then what do we do?" Odd asked.

I ignored him and asked, "What is it about trying to hack into their encryption that will let them know who we are?"

"I hacked into the Government's website to create a birth certificate for Aelita; I'm pretty good at hacking, if I do say so myself. But this guy, whoever it is, is better than me. He's got something set up to yank my information off of my computer if I try to find out who he is." At Ulrich's puzzled frown, he explained, "Your computer is registered under your name, and the government can use the Serial number to find out who and where you are."

"Okay, well can you re-register your computer under a different name?" Odd asked.

"I don't want to get into explaining residual information to you. But no," Jeremie said. "Here's the problem. See?" He asked, and pointed at a long line of computer code that was written in gibberish and made no sense.

"No. I don't read Nerd language, but I'll take your word for it," I said. "And the solution is simple. Just hack from another computer."

"It's not that simple," Jeremie said. "I have to hack through Lyoko because that's where he—the hacker-is watching us from. And since the program that _runs_ Lyoko, or at least allows me to access it, is unique to this computer, I'd have to transfer it to another computer. The problem is that part of that program was created on this computer so it's linked to me. Even if I do install it on another computer, my information will still follow me. But it was a good try!" He said.

"So are we just going to let him keep watching us?" Ulrich asked, as Yumi said, "What happens when we have to go to Lyoko next time? Will he be able to tell who we are?"

Jeremie shook his head. "I can't tell much about him other than that he'll get me if I try to find out who he is. I have no idea if he can see who's on Lyoko or if he's only able to tell that it's been active."

"What if it's Franz Hopper?" Odd volunteered. "He might be watching Lyoko to figure out where Aelita went."

"To the best of my knowledge, Franz Hopper is still on Lyoko, although it's possible that he's escaped. But I think it's best that we treat whoever or whatever is watching us as a malevolent presence until we figure out whether it's friendly or not," Jeremie said. "The only thing worse than one of us being kidnapped is _all_ of us being kidnapped because we tried to make friends with the bad guys."

"Okay, so being friendly isn't an option. Can you block him from the program?" I asked. "Like blocking people on Skype, but… not," I finished lamely. "I don't really know how to explain what I mean. Do you understand?"

He nodded. "I understand. I'm working on it, but it takes time. I have to write a program that fits within the codes to Lyoko and that tells it to repel intruders. The problem is that _we_ are intruders, so I have to create a program that repels our spy without repelling us." He pinched the bridge of his nose and leaned back in his chair. "You guys really need to learn Java so you can help me."

"No way, Einstein," Ulrich said. "That's your business. If we learn Java, then you have to come to Lyoko."

"That is _not_ going to happen," Jeremie said, and immediately swiveled in his chair to keep working.

ZXCVBNM

By the time Prom rolled around I was more than just a trifle nervous. Lydia had informed me that she would be helping me and Aelita get ready for the dance, which I understood meant that she would really be forcibly applying makeup to our faces and curling our hair (or mine, at least; Aelita didn't have enough hair to curl). We'd invited Yumi, but she told us that she preferred to get ready alone, as she didn't enjoy spending inordinate amounts of time primping in front of the mirror. None of us girls did, really; we were all rather tomboyish, although Aelita was the girliest of the three of us. Lydia was my sister-in-law, though, and she was Aelita's aunt, so we had to do what she said.

Once we were done getting ready, my dad ushered us into Connor's ancient stick-shift Honda. My dad had been chaperoning Prom since Dan and Eric had been at Kadic; they were the troublemakers of the family, and my dad had mentioned more than once that he didn't trust them to not get into shenanigans by tricking the other chaperones into believing whatever gobbledygook they (my brothers, I mean) had come up with that night in order to sneak out with some girls and make out underneath the bleachers. Now that it was just me, Jake, and Mason going, my dad claimed Prom was too much fun to spend the night at home with his other, more interesting, children. So, he tagged along.

Yumi, Jeremie, Ulrich, and Odd were waiting for Aelita and I as we hopped out of the car from where my dad had dropped us off at the front gate of the school. Kadic was a walking campus, so none of the students had cars. There _was_ a faculty parking lot but it was forever away, and even though it was a hike to get to the cafeteria from the front gate, it was still better than having to traverse the entire universe to get back from the faculty lot.

Jeremie had finally asked Aelita to Prom, and he had worked up the courage to not only ask her to prom, but to ask her on a _date_ to prom. As in, an I-like-you-as-more-than-my-friend date to prom. I hadn't been there when it happened, but from what I'd heard from Odd, who'd heard from Ulrich, who'd heard from Yumi, who'd heard from Aelita, there had been a lot of blushing and stuttering and a little bit of sweating going on before Jeremie ever got around to asking Aelita.

She'd said yes, of course, and now they stood like the two awkward ones out as we walked back to the school. It was obvious that neither one really knew how to act around the other yet, with the rules and boundaries of their relationship having been so drastically changed over such a short period of time. Yumi and Ulrich were only slightly less awkward, as it was apparent to everyone (except them) that they liked each other. They kept inadvertently flirting with each other and not realizing it. It was hilarious from the outside, but I'd been in Yumi's shoes before, and I knew how disheartening it was to not know where you stood in your relationship with that special boy. Yumi wasn't really a traditionalist, though, so I figured that if she wanted to ask Ulrich out, she wouldn't be afraid to do it because she was a girl—that is, she wouldn't let the fact that she was a girl get in the way of her trying to create a relationship. The fact that it is terrifying to bring someone your heart on a platter without knowing whether they are going to give you theirs in return or simply put your heart in a blender and make a smoothie out of it, however, might have been a contributing factor in Ulrich and Yumi's datelessness.

I knew where I stood with Odd, and I was mighty glad that I did. We talked and laughed and accidentally flirted sometimes, but for now he was just my best friend, and I was happy that way.

Inside the cafeteria, the music was thumping loudly enough that I could feel the bass through the soles of my feet and pulsating in my chest. There was a throng of students in the middle of the room, jiving to whatever song William was playing (he'd lost the competition to DJ the dance to Aelita, who had then given her position to William as she had been asked on a date to Prom). We Lyokians, needing a moment to warm up to the music, grabbed several glasses of punch and settled down on a table in the corner of the room.

Jeremie and Aelita were the first ones to break away and go dance. I admired them; they strutted out to the dance floor and started having the time of their lives, never mind who was watching them make fools out of themselves. Odd and I did eventually go out, to dance to a few slow songs, which I enjoyed infinitely more than the one fast song we danced to. Odd was short but somehow we worked together; I think it would have been weird to reach up and put my arms around his neck.

I was debating the merit of leaning my head down on Odd's shoulder when the music suddenly screeched to a stop, causing all sorts of chaos on the dance floor as people ran around in pandemonium and did their fair share of screaming. It got even worse when we realized that Sissi was bent over William, who was stretched out on the floor, having been shocked into unconsciousness by the music that was playing.

Like Mason's had been the one time he'd been attacked by X.A.N.A., William's ears were bleeding. Unlike Mason, he didn't open his eyes again. Jeremie knew immediately what was going on; he went to a corner of the room to check Lyoko's status from his ever-present laptop, while the rest of us discussed the best plan of action given what we knew about the hacker on Lyoko.

Once it was clear that William wasn't going to open his eyes and immediately resume his post as DJ of the dance, one of the chaperones withdrew his cell phone from his coat pocket and said, "I'm going to call emergency services." But as soon as he put his hand out and touched the doorknob, he, too, fell over in an electricity-induced stupor, ears bleeding.

"Well, that's just great," Ulrich said. "How do we get out?"

"The windows," I said, pointing to the wall of windows that took up the cafeteria's south wall. "If we can't go through the doors, maybe we can break a window and get through it without touching anything. Do you think the electricity will take up the empty space if the window is broken?"

"Nah," Yumi said. "I really doubt it. We've been covering circuits in Ms. Hertz's class," she added when we gave her dubious looks. "Glass will conduct electricity, sort of, but the current won't flow from broken glass across empty air to more broken glass. It might spark, but it probably won't if we make the gap big enough."

"Oh. Good," I said. "Who's gonna break the glass?"

We looked around for a moment, before Ulrich seized a chair and picked it up. "This should do nicely," he said, and hurled it through the window into the night air beyond.

ZXCVBNM

"Where exactly do you think you're going?" My father shouted after me as I dove off a table through the hole in the window. The crowd had surged forward when Ulrich broke the window, but they were all being restrained by Jim and the rest of the chaperones (including my dad). Aelita was being held back by Mrs. Hertz, who was glaring daggers at the rest of us. She (Aelita, I mean) stomped down on Mrs. Hertz's foot and then elbowed her in the stomach; clearly, she'd been taking lessons from Yumi. Then she sprinted forward, vaulted off a table, launched herself through the broken window, and joined the rest of us Lyokians outside.

"You just have to trust me!" I shouted back to my dad, and then turned to run after my friends.

ZXCVBNM

"There's something I haven't told you yet," Jeremie huffed as we sprinted through the woods. He'd had the foresight (and ingenuity) to shed his jacket, vest, and cummerbund in the cafeteria and was now rushing through the woods in only a shirt and pants, unlike Odd and Ulrich, who were flinging off bits of clothing piecemeal as they ran. Yumi, Aelita, and I had our dresses hiked up to our knees, and I was thankful that we were taller than our dates because we'd all wound up wearing flats instead of heels in order to remain roughly the same height as Jeremie, Odd, and Ulrich.

"Shoot," Odd said, shedding his tie for good measure.

"Well. The guy—or girl, I guess—that's watching us on Lyoko? I think it might be possible for them to kidnap us once we're there. Kind of like what happened to Franz Hopper."

_That_ brought proceedings to a screeching halt. "Well, jank," I said.

"Why didn't you tell us before?" Ulrich demanded as he, like Odd, flung off his tie. He went a step further and shed his dress shirt, so that he was standing before us in only his undershirt and dress pants. Suddenly I pictured Emilie drooling beside me, mentally urging Ulrich to _just take off the darn pants already!_ Modesty would have prevailed and she'd have turned red as a tomato and closed her eyes if he'd actually done it, though.

"I just found out about it a few hours before the dance; there wasn't time!" Jeremie gasped. "And I was sort of hoping that I could keep X.A.N.A. from attacking tonight by sheer force of will."

There was a lot of grumbling and muttering about that. "You've never asked us to risk our lives before," Ulrich finally pointed out to Jeremie. "Might as well start now."

"Are you crazy? We risk our lives every time we go to Lyoko! The scanners might as well be our coffins!" said Odd.

"It's safe, and you know it," Ulrich shot back. "X.A.N.A. hasn't been able to hurt us yet."

"_Yet_. Operative word," Odd retorted. "How do you know that they don't have Franz Hopper somewhere, torturing him?"

"Franz Hopper is still on Lyoko!" Aelita and Jeremie said vehemently and in unison.

They broke out into bickering and squabbling, and I started to think.

"You guys!" I said finally, halting the fight and centering the attention firmly on myself. "Don't you see? It has to be me."

Their reactions ranged from outrage to dismay, but I held up my hand to stop them. "I don't want to hear your opinions. You all know I'm right." I held up one finger. "You were doing fine as a team before I came, you'll do fine as a team if I die." I held up another finger. "I'm the weakest fighter." A third finger. "You need Aelita to deactivate the tower; she can't go." A fourth finger. "You need Jeremie to run the computer; he can't go." And a fifth finger. "You three are stronger and faster than me. Maybe nothing will happen, but if it does… I'm the obvious choice for a human sacrifice."

"Don't call it that!" Jeremie said sharply. "I see your point, all five of them, and I'll let you go. But we are _not_ sacrificing you to X.A.N.A. That's not how this is going to be remembered."

ZXCVBNM

Everyone but Odd and I stepped out of the elevator when the doors opened on the computer level. We all stared at each other for several moments, the silence so loud it was literally deafening. I don't know what they were thinking of—I was remembering the victories we'd won in this very room. "Hey, if—" Jeremie started, but I cut him off.

"No. I'm not saying goodbye," I said stubbornly. "Not to you and not to anyone else. You know what you're doing. You won't let me die. It'll be fine. I'm leaving now." And with that I punched the down button on the elevator, trying to ignore my friends' worried expressions as the door slid closed.

It had barely closed when Odd put his hands on my shoulders. "Hey! What—" I started to say, but that was as far as I got before he backed me up against the wall and kissed me behind my jaw, where my pulse was fluttering wildly. "If you die," he whispered, the feel of his breath on my skin making my pulse race faster, "I want to say I've kissed you." He slid his mouth along my cheek and kissed me once on the nose, then once more soundly on the mouth. I put one hand tentatively on his shoulder, and the doors slid open.

"Fartknockers," he whispered, leaning his head on my shoulder. He squeezed my arm once, sighed, and straightened up. "Go," he said. "I'll be here when you get back, I suppose."

I stepped into the scanner, saw the bright light, felt the blast of hot air, felt my body disintegrating. And then nothing.

ZXCVBNM

To be continued… With a time jump, Yumi's college decisions, and another DTR!

I PROMISE that I will FINISH this story by the end of the summer (sometime around mid-august). You have my permission to hunt me down and hold me prisoner if I'm not done by then. I mean it. This is literally one of the only goals I have for this summer.

That said, I'm sorry I've been AWOL for the last six months. School is crazy. Life is crazy. Whoosh.


End file.
